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BIOL 4290: Marine Biology and Ocean Sustainability

Resources to help you complete the presentation assignment in BIOL 4290, Fall 2017

Erin's Choice #1: Designing Effective Science Presentations

This is an excellent presentation and Dr. McConnell is a good role model for presenting.

This is a longer video, but well worth your time. She goes into more depth than you will need for 12 minutes, but many of her points are applicable to your paper or blog presentations. The talk is divided into: Minutes 0 to 19:10 - Using Powerpoint wisely and Minutes 19:10 to 42:08 - How to structure a science presentation. See commentator Wes Suhler below the video for a further breakdown and links to the sections of the presentation.

For paper presentations, you don't have to present every figure in the paper, just the most important for understanding. Make "data dives" for two or three points. For blog posts, to make the "data dives" mentioned in this talk, you might use one important experiment and result from each of two to three papers.

How to Give an Awesome PowerPoint Presentation

Give proper attribution to papers and images

Showing other scientists' research and images are a must for science presentations, but we always want to respect the rights of authors when we use these. Here are some tips for using research and images properly.

  • For single paper presentations, put the citation for the article on an early slide and state that subsequent images are from the paper. This gives proper attribution to the authors.
  • For presentations about multiple papers, put an abbreviated citation, e.g., Jones et al., 2019, at the bottom of the slide where you show an image and/or discuss paper and then add full citations in the reference list on one of the last slides. This gives proper attribution to the authors.
  • You must get the author's permission to use the images if 1) you are going to use this presentation multiple times in the future, and/or 2) it's going to be stored online where the general public can access it.

How to prepare good images

Distorted or overly complex images will confuse your audience. Make sure to adjust the size or resolution to create good images for your presentation.

  • Use a snipping tool (e.g., Windows has Snipping Tool) to cut only the essential images or parts of images to insert in your presentation.
  • It's even better if the online paper gives you different sizes of an image to download. Choose more pixels than fewer.
  • After downloading an image, you can open it in Paint or a comparable software to resize and/or crop it.
  • Insert the image in Powerpoint and don't forget to give the attribution for the image.

Text Instructions for Preparing a Presentation

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