The conversation in my ILC recap has taken a few predictable turns, namely the one where I expect too much of presentations, that I need to lighten up on the presenters. I don't know how to relax my standards or if that's even a good idea. I do know how to distill everything I have ever enjoyed about any presentation into two steps. I don't care what your presentation covers; if you manage these, I will love it.

1. Unless your presentation is billed as "beginner-level" don't include information I can easily Google. What I mean is, while I know nothing about Photo Story, it was painful spending seat-time on a tutorial for adding narration to Photo Story, which is Google's top result for the same query. I can get that anytime¹.
2. Instead, cover the stuff I can't Google, that stuff that makes your presence worth my district's money and my time. Here's an easy outline: a) why Photo Story; what problem were you trying to solve? should I care about that problem? b) what complications did you encounter while implementing Photo Story? how did you overcome them? c) what did you learn?

This particular outline forces you to reckon with audience expectations and puts you in a position to satisfy them. It would have improved fourteen of the eighteen presentations² I attended at ILC³.

1. This was the most dissonant element of ILC. Half the presenters told me not to tell my kids stuff their steroidal smart phones could tell them. The other half were doing the opposite. [back]
2. None of which were about Photo Story, okay? [back]
3. Though this outline is useless if you turn your back to the audience and read aloud from a slide titled "What I Learned." [back]