Today, Two quick lessons of clicker abuse or rather lack of clicker abuse.
Example number 1. Joe (we are not using his real name to protect him from public ridicule) stepped up to the front of the room. He then fumbled with his laptop for about 5 minutes to get plugged in and to load his slides. Finally, he stepped away and began his talk.
Clickerless Joe stopped his presentation, walked over to his laptop and pressed the enter key to advance his next slide. If he only had a few slides it would have been bad enough.
But we were not so lucky. Joe had many slides and his interruptions were a major distraction. Come on Joe!
Henrietta, like-wise, did not invest in a clicker. When she arrived at the venue she found that her laptop had to be set up far away from where she would speak. She enlisted a helper to advance her slides whenever necessary using a very discrete hand signal. All worked well until her helper advanced too many too quickly and then it was a fun time watching as they both tried to get back on track.
Don’t be like Joe and Henrietta. Be prepared.
Buy a clicker, they are less than 20 bucks. Practice with it. Get to your location early. Test everything out.
And then hope the little nasties that live in every speaker’s laptop and PowerPoint program don’t sabotage your best efforts.
Because, if you are not watching, they will.
You can’t avoid all the bad stuff, but his guy will help you deal with most of it: https://ready2speak.com/course
Tom
