This week I have been attending the Microsoft Essential Presentation Skills course. Originally I was inspired to attend this course after reading about the opportunities with becoming a Microsoft Certified Trainer in a blog post by Ben Bedo on the Trainsignal website on how to become a MCT.
Ben referred to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with a list of Microsoft Approved Presentation Skills Training Provider. After carefully evaluating the providers listed I decided to try to contact Sheena Whyatt at Lightning Training UK.
The course is 3 days long and to be held at the University of York. I will try to capture the progress of each day here, so come back for updates.
Day 0
Before Monday morning I need to prepare a 20 minute training presentation. This will be used to evaluate my current training style and presentation techniques.
Day 1
Great day attempting to consume all of the material. The day started off with a short introduction and icebreaker – by the way, I am a Snickers bar. Sheena then guided a group discussion about how we have experienced training sessions we received previously. This continued onto a new group discussion on learning barriers, which I thought was quite interesting!
The day ended with each of us performing our 20 minute training presentation. I received some fair critique, but it went much better than I had hoped for, so in that sense I would call it a success!
We were handed some homework for tomorrow, which will help figure out what type of learning style we each prefer currently.
I might however be having a harder time than I should, because there are being thrown fancy English words left and right which I am not 100% clear on. Just have to keep up the pace!
Day 2
All the way from morning until lunch our trainer, Sheena, provided a myriad of information. I am not quite sure if my head gave up a few times along the way, because there was just so much information to take in all at once.
However the level was high and reflecting back upon the information, I am sure most of it will follow me for the courses I will hopefully produce/teach in the future.
The afternoon presented a challenge, which stressed quite well why you should always ensure you are understanding the task at hand correctly and not making too many assumptions. The task was to prepare a lesson plan for a 10 minute presentation, however it seemed like everyone thought they were supposed to actually build a 10 minute presentation.
Soon we found out there would not actually be any presentation, but a good long talk about how the group reacted to the sudden stress from the task.
More homework for tomorrow. Use the new material learned to fix / remake my first 20 minute presentation and think up an icebreaker/energizer to use in the presentation.