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• Mr. Newton, could you present the new math curriculum to the School Board next Wednesday night?
• Congratulations, Ms. Curie, your project has been chosen to be presented at the regional science conference!
• Somebody's got to present the new discipline policy to the incoming freshman class on opening day...
• The PTA wants to see how their computer donation is being used -- Mrs. Speilberg, can you make a little slide show with pictures, to present at their meeting next week?

Many of us are comfortable presenting from a computer to our own classes, in a familiar classroom, to a small and trusted group. But what happens when we are asked to make a multimedia manifestation to an auditorium full of expectant strangers? Or even to a large group of students in an unfamiliar location? How should you prepare for this? What should be considered? What's the best way to go about it?

You will spend more hours preparing your presentation than delivering it. You must first decide the form of your presentation: PowerPoint slide show, Flash animation, Word document, Excel chart, QuickTime movie. The possibilities are endless, and your choice will depend on two things:

• the nature of the ideas you need to present
• your own facility with the software tools

The presentation to the PTA might best take the form of a series of images of students using the new computer, including photos and video, delivered through PowerPoint or QuickTime. The new math sequence might best be shown as a table built with Excel or Word. A new procedure might best be illustrated through a Flash animation.

No matter which program you choose, you should follow a few style guidelines as you prepare your presentation. Wherever possible, use images to communicate ideas, rather than words. Distill your concepts down to a single picture and a single word -- this works much better in a group presentation environment. Provide details through your narration, not through words on the screen. For some good advice in this regard, consult in this series How to Make a Slide Show with PowerPoint, and Animation with PowerPoint .

You may save the presentation to your own computer, to some kind of storage media, to a server, or on the Web. Or to some combination of these. Be warned that few presentations these days will fit onto a floppy disk, and fewer and fewer computers come equipped to read floppies. Better to use a USB memory stick, or to burn a CD -- these now have a more universal application, and can hold more data.

But the best place to store your presentation is on the Web. From there it is accessible from anywhere to anyone who has an internet connection. (Anything stored on the Web can also be saved to other storage media as well.) To store on the Web, you need to save the presentation in a format that works well on the Web -- HTML pages or Flash files are best in this regard, but you can also put PowerPoint, Excel or Word documents onto your Web server and download them from anywhere.

As a teacher, the more of your presentations that are stored on the Web, the easier it is to use them in your work -- if you are in a connected classroom, you can quickly call up any of your lectures or demonstrations. And you can make them available to your students, or to your colleagues, or to your audience, without making and sending disks, CD-ROMs, or huge attachments to email messages. Storing your presentations on the Web allows you to build an online library of teaching materials that can be useful to many people in a variety of settings.

Will you deliver the presentation from the computer that's provided in the presentation room? Or will you bring your own laptop? This is an important decision. If you rely on the computer provided, you must ensure that it will display your presentation properly. Does it have the software you need to run your presentation? Is it the same version that you used to create it? Does the resolution of the display match that of your presentation? Does it have the sound and video players (plug-ins) you need? Is its processor and video system fast enough to display what you have created? Is the computer connected to the Internet? How fast is the connection? Is it filtered such that it might block access to what you have saved? Is it properly connected to the projector? In most cases, there is no way to answer these questions without going to that computer and trying your presentation with the projector.

If you take your own computer to the venue, you must ensure that it will work in the presentation room. Do you have the connectors and adapters you need to connect to the projector? Do they have the right kind of wall plugs - something to check in an older building that may not have the right kind of sockets for three prong plugs? Can you get the resolution of your computer to match with that of the projector? Do you have the cable or adapter you need to connect to the network? Do you need any passwords or IP addresses in order to access the Web? Though fewer questions arise with this approach, you must in most cases visit the presentation room and try it out well in advance of your appointed hour.

The nature of the presentation room has an important effect on the listening (and watching) experience of your audience. You must in most cases re-arrange things to ensure an effective reception of your message by your listeners. The first objective of your reformation of the venue is to make sure they all can see. Make sure that as little light as possible -- from natural or incandescent sources -- falls on the projection screen. This may require moving the screen so that it is not facing the windows. And make sure the screen is high enough that folks can see it above the heads of the row in front of them.

Locate the projector so that its image fills the screen exactly. This may require some additions or rearrangements of furniture and props to achieve a good result. And all this moving may require you to relocate the computer so that it is within a cable's length of the projector. Locate the projector so that you can face the audience and see the computer at the same time. And don't forget the sound -- if your presentation uses music or video or voice, you will need to make sure that all in your audience can hear. This will require some kind of amplification of the built-in sound of the computer.

Now that the screen and the sound are set, you should move the chairs of the audience to achieve the best viewing angles. Move them as close to the screen as possible. Arrange them in concentric semicircles instead of straight rows. Stagger the alignment so that no one is looking directly at the back of another's head. Dim the lights, put your presentation on the screen, and then sit in a sampling of the chairs to ensure that the view is acceptable from throughout the room.

When it's time to stand and deliver, all that preparation will prove its worth. Stand at the computer, look at the audience, and tell them what you're going to tell them. Then begin your presentation. Explain each concept in your own words as the slide appears on the screen. Don't read aloud the words on the screen -- the audience will do that by itself, silently. Instead, tell the story that the slides illustrate. Don't turn around and look at the projection screen -- instead, look at the audience and as necessary glance at the computer. If you have rehearsed well, you'll know what's going to appear on the next slide and be able to narrate a smooth sequence.

Whenever possible, let the audience see and hear one idea at a time -- don't present a screenful of words or pictures all at once. Speak slowly. Pause between ideas to let them sink in. Take questions as they arise. Provoke controversy and invite comments from the audience. Interactivity works, if you know how to promote and manage it. At the end, step away from the computer and tell them what you just told them -- they will appreciate this oral summary.

Now, the next time they ask you to make that special presentation, you'll have a head start at doing it well.