I’m putting together a presentation with Bill Ferris on Virtual Mentoring for the 2008 Raising Achievement & Closing Gaps Conference in Greensboro, NC. (Info for stalkers: Bill and I have two presentations next Tuesday, at 9:15 AM and 2:30 PM.)

It’s been a while since I have created a presentation from scratch; David Walbert and I did one on Web 2.0 last fall, but rather than create a “presentation,” we threw up a wiki with some talking points, and then asked the group to explore and edit, and then we brought them back together for some discussion, during which we modified the wiki. We did the presentation a couple of times, each time using the most up-to-date version of the wiki, and it got better, I thought. It was fun.

Bill and I don’t plan to have participant computers (or even Internet access) for this one, so it was time to create a PowerPoint. I’ve heard about– heck, I’ve presented about– effective use of PowerPoint, but Dan Meyer’s repeated posts about transforming presentations got me thinking about how I could do better, and working collaboratively with Bill meant that I couldn’t be lazy about planning or I’d be making his life more difficult.

So I set a goal– more slides than words in this presentation. I was going to try to find images (using a Creative Commons search on Flickr) that would be more effective at presenting the information than any number of bullet points.

End result: fail. I found one place where it behooved me to include what looks a little like a tag cloud. But the presentation is a far more visual animal than I’ve ever used before, and while it isn’t going to change the world or make the listeners faint with glee, I think it’ll be more stimulating than the norm.

Photos from flickr by Creativity + Timothy K Hamilton, otisarchive1, woodleywonderworks, Del Far, and welshkaren. People who share with Creative Commons are awesome.