Why Do We Use Filler Words? - And a Tool to Help You Eliminate Them in Presentations

TED-Ed recently published a new video that addresses the question of why we say "like" and other filler words in our conversations. The video is full of interesting pieces of information about why we use filler words and how they can serve a purpose in conversations. For example, saying "like" is often serving the same purpose as an "um" in conversation. Another neat thing I learned from the video is that a filled pause can help toddlers identify uncommon or new words. The video is titled Why Do We, Like, Hesitate When We, Um, Speak? and you can see it with its associated lesson on this TED-Ed page. 

 

Watching this TED-Ed lesson reminded me of a good tool for practicing presentations so that you don't use too many filler words. That tool is Microsoft's Presenter Coach which is available in the online version of PowerPoint. Presenter Coach will give you feedback on the pacing of your presentations, your use of filler words, and your use of sensitive phrases. In this video I demonstrate how to use Presenter Coach in PowerPoint. 

How to Create a Google Slides Template

A couple of weeks ago I published directions for creating and editing master slides in Google Slides. Last week I received a follow-up question regarding using those edited master slides as a template for other presentations. If you're using Google Slides in a G Suite for Education Google Workspaces for Education account, there is a fairly easy way to turn your master slides into a template for you and your students to use and re-use. In this video I demonstrate how that process works to create a Google Slides template. 

Applications for Education
Creating a template is a great way to use consistent branding of presentations and it's also great for helping students follow guidelines for presentations. For example, I have a rule that font must be at least 28 points with no more than three lines per slide. Having a template for students to follow is a good way to help them follow those basic guidelines.

How to Customize Video Playback in PowerPoint

Whether it's to illustrate a point, to tug at heart strings, or to provide comic relief a good video clip can help move a presentation along. But that's not the case if you have to spend time searching for a segment of a video in the middle of your presentation. That's why you should try to set a specific playback marker when inserting videos into your PowerPoint slides. 

You can customize video playback in PowerPoint when you use videos that are stored on your computer as well as when you use videos that are hosted on YouTube. When you use a video that is hosted on your computer you can specify a start and end time for the video clip. When you use a video that is hosted on YouTube you can specify a start time. If you have the choice between using a video clip that is stored on your computer or one that is hosted on YouTube, use the one that is stored on your computer. In this short video you can see why that matters. 

In this video I demonstrate how to insert videos into your PowerPoint slides and how to customize the playback of those videos. 

How to Specify Video Playback Settings in Google Slides

Last week Google announced a small, but potentially annoying change to the default video playback settings in Google Slides. Fortunately, you can override the default playback setting for the videos that you use in Google Slides. This applies to videos that you add from YouTube as well as videos that you insert from your Google Drive account. 

In the following video I demonstrate how to change the video playback settings in Google Slides. This video also includes information on how to specify which part of a video that you want to show in your slide.