Social Media & Visual Design - An Interview With Guy Kawasaki

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Guy Kawasaki about his role with Canva and his upcoming keynote at iPad Summit Boston on November 17th. During the interview, embedded below, In we chatted about the role of social media in schools and visual design. At the end of the chat Guy makes his prediction for the upcoming NHL season too.


Disclosure: I have been an advisor to Canva. iPad Summit Boston is an advertiser on this blog.

3 Good Books and Videos About Crafting Stories and Presentations

Last month's most popular post was 6 Alternatives to PowerPoint and Keynote. A lot of times when we think about putting together presentations we think about the slides first. But a good presentation starts with a good story and starts before we create our first slides. Over the years I've watched lots of videos and read even more articles about presentation and story design. Watch a Guy Kawasaki presentation if you want to see some of the best presentation methods in action, I'm partial to this one about his book Enchantment. Over the years three books have influenced much of what goes into my presentations, here they are in reverse chronological order.

Last fall Lee Lefever, the founder of Common Craft, published The Art of Explanation. I recorded a short interview with Lee and you can watch it below. One of my big take-aways from the book was the idea of avoiding "the curse of knowledge." The curse of knowledge is basically knowing so much about a topic that you forget that what you take for granted is not as easily understood by non-experts. Explaining things is something that we do every day in our classrooms and I know that I'm guilty of sometimes suffering from the curse of knowledge.


Dan Roam's Unfolding the Napkin is the workbook companion to his Back of the Napkin series of books. Even if you don't read his other books, the workbook is still very useful as it will walk you through the process of thinking about stories and telling those stories in a clear manner. The concept is that if you can break a big concept into small sketches, you can explain it. You can get a sense of what Unfolding the Napkin is about by watching the ten minute video below.


When the time comes to craft your slides and practice your presentation, Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds is the place to turn to for advice. Get a sample of what Presentation Zen is about by watching the nine minute video below.

365 Projects - Now I Get It, Building a Media Library

Ken explains font types

I've seen people doing all kinds of 365 Projects for years now. Some have been focused on taking one picture per day, some have been about creating or capturing sounds, and others have been focused on video. I never really "got" the appeal of these projects until Friday morning when I sat in on Ken Shelton's presentation about presentation design. Ken made a good case for committing to a 365 Project. It's a good way to build up a library of media that you can use in your own presentations.

Applications for Education
I've always told people that the best way to avoid any Copyright issues is to use your own media in presentations. One challenge with that if you're on a tight time schedule, you might not be able to create all the media you need. Another challenge is the weather and seasons. As Ken said in his presentation, "if you want a picture of rain, you have to go out in the rain." By committing to a 365 Project you can build a library of your media that you and or your students can use for creating presentations.

For more advice on designing and delivering presentations, watch these three videos from Guy Kawasaki and Garr Reynolds.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going out to take a few pictures.

Short and Sweet Presentation Advice

This year, as I do every year, I plan to help my students develop the life-long skill of delivering good presentations to an audience. To that end I try to make my students strive to take Guy Kawasaki's advice about font use on slides. Guy Kawasaki is one of the best presenters that I've seen. In the two minute video below Kawasaki shares his advice for delivering an effective presentation. In the video he is speaking to a tech/ business audience, but 98% of what he says applies to any audience.



For a bit more in the way of presentation advice, particularly regarding slide design, watch this ten minute talk by Garr Reynolds. Reynolds is the author of Presentation Zen.



And here is Reynolds putting his advice into practice at TEDxToyko.

Good Presentation Advice from Guy Kawasaki

I find Guy Kawasaki to be one of the most entertaining presenters in the field of social media. In this short video Guy offers some excellent advice about creating and giving slide presentations.


Applications for Education
For students the key point in this video is Guy's comments about knowing your presentation well enough that you do not have to read from the slides. Reading from slides is a trap that I find a lot of students fall into. One way to help students avoid that pitfall is to have them present with Ignite-style presentations in which the slides automatically advance.

Alltop - Links for Homeschooling

Last Wednesday I wrote a blog post about Alltop. Alltop is a Guy Kawasaki project and it seems that he never stops working to improve Alltop. Today, through one of Guy's Twitter messages I learned that Alltop has a page dedicated to sharing links about homeschooling for homeschooling parents. If you're a homeschooling parent or work with homeschooling parents check out Alltop's Homeschool page.