Make your presentations pop

Remember the last time you sat through a presentation reading every word the speaker said because, well, there they all were, looming large on a big screen?

How soon did you quit listening and just start reading?

How soon did you think to yourself, just hand me the printout of the slides, and I can read them at home in a comfy chair?

Or, worse, how soon did you give up on the presentation altogether and start planning your weekend?

We’ve all been there – but hopefully not as presenters!

After all, PowerPoints and newer Prezis can be truly powerful tools to spice up presentations. But they need to be used creatively and as a means of supplementing or reinforcing your points. Mostly, though, they should be used to engage your audience.

How do you do that? One, never, ever simply rewrite your notes into a number of slides. Even if the words are not verbatim but pared down into bullet-points, you risk losing your audience if you don’t do more.

Sure, bullet points can be effective, but only when they are used to highlight the most important points that you are verbally elaborating on. When you use them, make sure they are there to reinforce the most important ideas presenting.

Another common mistake with electronic presentations is the use of detailed spreadsheets or charts. True, this is a way of supplementing the words being spoken, but we’ve seen too many that are way to complex to be shown in this manner -- the cells, numbers and words are simply too tiny for audience members to be able to see, let alone comprehend. Again, pull out the most important statistics or results, highlight those on the screen and just talk about the rest.

A better way to use either PowerPoints or Prezis is to illustrate important points with a fitting photo, funny cartoon or pertinent video clip that serves to illustrate a point.  Those techniques, when used well, grab and hold your listeners' attention, making it much more likely that they’ll get what you are trying to say.

Prezis are fun because you can be even more creative. For instance, a presentation First Class Communication gave about branding zeroed in on different parts of a cartoonish, branded cow.

With everything that’s available on the Web, there’s no excuse to have a boring presentation…ever…again.

APSRC's PSE Insurance Central gives educators one-stop info source

If you've been following the public school employee health insurance issue, you know it's complicated. And, if you haven't been following it -- well, you need to start.

The Arkansas Public School Resource Center (APSRC) hired First Class Communication to assist with its PSE Insurance Central, a single repository of information to make it easier for school district leaders and all public school employees to keep up with the latest developments in the health insurance arena.

 
Why should educators pay attention? Only because the school employee health insurance system in Arkansas is bound to look a lot different within a couple of years. Why? Changes are hurling toward the system from two sides -- the federal Affordable Care Act and the state legislature via the State and Public School Life and Health Insurance Program Legislative Task Force.

The legislature created the Task Force last fall after the State of Arkansas was forced to bail out the public school employee health plan to keep insurance rates from increasing dramatically. The Task Force was charged with spending the next one to two years determining how best to restructure the state's system to both be viable and to co-exist with the new federal mandates. No easy feat, for sure.

No doubt, the final outcome could mean big changes for school districts and school employees both. Will school districts have to offer their own plans? Will all school employees be directed to the new state exchange? These are only two of the many possible outcomes voiced so far.

At APSRC's PSE Insurance Central, you'll find:

• Summaries of each Task Force meeting
• A weekly blog with the latest news and announcements
• FAQ about the state and federal health insurance plans
• A calendar of Task Force meetings and other related events 

If you have questions about either the state school employee health plan or the Affordable Care Act you that you would like researched and answered, send them to APSRC's Katie Clifford or First Class Communication's Julie Johnson Holt.

STEAM teachers will love Innovation Hub

We’ve got to tell you about one of our cutting-edge clients that will be contributing lots to the education arena.

The Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub will be doing all kinds of classes and programs to equip entrepreneurs and innovators to succeed at home, but there are some things that will specifically appeal to educators.

Just this week the Innovation Hub announced a partnership with the EAST Initiative to create The STEAM Room at the coming-soon Argenta Innovation Center. STEAM, as many of you know, stands for science, mathematics, engineering, art and mathematics.

EAST is already in more than 200 schools in six states with its respected model for STEM education, but this will be the first time it is able to offer its curricula to adults as well as to students.

Examples of training and programs to be offered in The STEAM Room include coding, programming, 3-D design, animation, videography, graphic design and more.

The Innovation Hub will offer some cool after-school programs, too, like a club for students interested in computer programming -- as well as school-day (field trip!) opportunities any STEAM subject teacher will want to take advantage of for his or her students.   

For instance, at  The Launch Pad, also to be located in the Argenta Innovation Center, school groups will have the opportunity to work on some expensive, high-tech equipment in the areas of computer technology, electronics, carpentry, machining and metalwork.

No doubt, the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub will make a splash in the world of economic development, but the school community will benefit from some major ripples as well.

To stay up to date with the Hub’s happenings , sign up for the Innovation Hub’s e-newsletter at www.arhub.org.

It's time for a resolution

For 2014, I resolve to do a better job with this blog.

There. I said it. Now I just have to follow through.

Truly, I think I will because I've made it easier on myself. I'm embarrassed to say, but I jumped into  writing this blog two years ago without any proper planning. That's exactly what we at First Class Communication advise our clients NOT to do. It  causes us to shudder when they do -- strong, convulsing shudders, in fact.

So, if your New Year's resolutions include communicating better with your constituents, here are a few tips on creating, starting and -- hardest of all -- maintaining a blog.

After all, blogs -- when used correctly and consistently -- are great information and marketing tools. Superintendents, principals, teachers, business owners, company executives -- heck, anyone really -- can use them to accomplish any number of important goals:

• Distributing information
• Promoting organizational values
• Inspiring action 
• Selling products or ideas
• Creating an online community

If you're thinking about a blog for your school district, your school or your class, think specifically about what you hope to accomplish with it. (For First Class Communication, it's being recognized as a trusted communication/public relations firm with expertise in education issues, specifically as they relate to Arkansas, i.e., we want you to know us as the firm "where education and communication conspire".)

After your overarching goals are defined, it's easy to drill down to appropriate themes, specific topics and then story ideas to fill each post. Once those are listed, you'll want to create an editorial calendar -- this will help you organize entries in such a way that you don't keep writing on the same topic ad nauseam. Nobody wants that, trust us.

You'll want to mix in announcements and news with some information about yourself and what you provide (but keep the all-about-me-news to about 10 percent of your content, please!) Businesses specifically don't want to come across as if they are trying to sell something every time they put up a new blog entry. And if you can keep entries somewhere between 300 - 700 words, you'll keep readers engaged and get noticed by search engines, too. Woo hoo!

Blogs should be thought of as sometimes helpful, sometimes entertaining and always worth reading.

Some people post daily, but we advise our clients to try for at least one post a week, three max, and to utilize other social media channels for more frequent engagement.

I've got my calendar filled out for the first of 2014, so look for the next Extra Credit post to appear on Jan. 15. You'll have to come back to find out what it's about, though.

Respected Teacher Speaks out on CCSS

We think Kathy Powers is one of the most dynamic teachers in the state.

We first met her when she won the title of Arkansas Teacher of the Year,  and we were immediately impressed by two things -- her relationships with her students and her passion for improving learning for ALL students.

During her tenure as Teacher of the Year, she and her husband produced research identifying environmental factors associated with improving learning for lower socio-economic students. Those are the ones, after all, who often have the most ground to make up to reach their potentials. Her hope is that school districts and communities would work together to provide the best environment possible for student learning.

Today we stumbled on her blog about teaching the Common Core State Standards.  She recognizes the value of the standards, is honest about the challenges faced in transitioning, and confronts some of the myths spread by anti-CCSS folks.

In short, it's worth reading for any educator transitioning to the new standards.

What if we said ALL need college?

I cringe every time I hear someone say, “Not everyone needs to go to college.”

For too long, too many of us have assumed our children don’t need more education than we had. That’s when you hear, “I didn’t go to college, and I’m doing just fine.” Or, even worse, that line turns into an easy out for giving up on hard-to-teach or unmotivated kids.

Study after study tells us that most of the jobs of the future will require some level of education after high school. We also know that, if we want our youth to remain in Arkansas as adults, we have to be able to both build and attract the jobs that provide for a decent quality of life. Those jobs require more than a high school education.

No matter what set of statistics you look, Arkansas ranks poorly in education rankings: 

• According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arkansas's four-year college completion rate of 19.7 percent pales to Deleware's 54.8 percent, Missouri's 35 percent and even Mississippi's 26 percent.
• In terms of two-year graduation rates, we rank closer to the middle, but with only 12.4 percent graduating on time.
• If you rank states by the percent of 25-44 year-olds holding bachelor's degrees or higher, Arkansas sits at 46th.

Among the poorest fourth of Americans, fewer than one in 10 graduated from college, according to a recent Brookings Institution study. How many of those live in Arkansas, I wonder.

So maybe it's true that not every high school graduate needs to go to college, in Arkansas, a lot more of them do.

Ugghh...not voucher talk again!

In our opinion.

Curtis Coleman addressed Little Rock’s Political Animal’s Club early this morning. Mostly he talked about cutting taxes (though, as you'd expect, not about the elimination of services those cuts would cause).

He did, finally, touch on education.

He said he was for school choice. Lest you be confused like I was, he wasn’t espousing legally expanding school choice between school districts. Nope, he meant the school-voucher-kind of school choice.  Not that he used the V word until questioned specifically about his meaning, but, yeah, he was talking about vouchers.

The V word was then followed by that tired ol’ platitude that the free market system is all we need to fix our schools.

Funny how the free-market system in education always entails public funds following students to private schools.  That’s government-subsidized business, isn’t it? Free market folks always want government to stay out of the way, yet they also want government money.

Really…this makes sense?

But let's say you follow Coleman’s so-called free-market process and let public funds follow kids to private schools, here’s what you’ll get: More and more folks will come out of the woodwork to open “private” schools. 

This is what happened with charter schools. Some – many, even – were well-meaning individuals with their hearts in the right place. They wanted to serve challenging student populations. But, often, they either underestimated the resources it would take to run a school or they knew too little about educating kids.

One of the most heart-breaking days I experienced while at the Arkansas Department of Education was hearing testimony about how students in a failed charter school (privately run) were several academic years behind their counterparts when the charter school closed and they returned to their local public schools.

We not only let these entrepreneurial educators experiment with our kids, we let them cause harm.

Granted, in Coleman’s world, there will be some high-achieving private schools. And, I’d bet, these will be located in the more affluent areas of the state because that’s where they can recruit and attract the faculty that will help them be successful. They will also very likely cater (simply by where they place their facility) to the higher-achieving students who will also make them look more successful. 


This will only exacerbates the problem this state has been working so hard to rectify: a situation in which kids from better off families and in more affluent areas of the state are more likely to have an exceptional education while poorer kids and kids in poorer parts of the state have fewer opportunities to sit in well-equipped classrooms taught by bright, talented teachers in up-to-date school buildings managed by progressive educational leaders.

So, instead of producing a better system, vouchers would make it worse.