Here's a technique I've used successfully twice. Bring 8-10 cheap laser pointers to your talk and pass them out to random members of the audience. You need one with a different color (like green) for yourself. You need to have prepared some 'prompt' slides that have options on them. For example, at an accreditation conference I had a slide with:
Years to accreditation: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
I asked the laser-enable attendees to put a spot on the screen corresponding to their own status. This is a lot quicker than Q&A and generates excitement. One caveat--it's hard for them to tell which spot is theirs, so they dance around a fair bit. Obviously you need a well-behaved audience for this. Not all slides need to be interactive, but about one in four or five seems to work fine.
The whole story is at http://www.coker.edu/assessment.
Generating Interaction
Here's a technique I've used successfully twice. Bring 8-10 cheap laser pointers to your talk and pass them out to random members of the audience. You need one with a different color (like green) for yourself. You need to have prepared some 'prompt' slides that have options on them. For example, at an accreditation conference I had a slide with:
Years to accreditation: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
I asked the laser-enable attendees to put a spot on the screen corresponding to their own status. This is a lot quicker than Q&A and generates excitement. One caveat--it's hard for them to tell which spot is theirs, so they dance around a fair bit. Obviously you need a well-behaved audience for this. Not all slides need to be interactive, but about one in four or five seems to work fine.
The whole story is at http://www.coker.edu/assessment.
David Eubanks
http://zzascape.blogspot.com