PRESENTATION

Oral Presentation (10%)

• Properly time your presentation; involve a number of students from your group in the presentation; have one student responsible for running the presentation (introducing topics, people etc.); use communication standards appropriate for the occasion (imagine you are giving this presentation to a group of professionals, but not necessarily from this particular area of study).

• Briefly list (introduce) all sections of the presentation in the beginning. A handout showing the table of contents for the presentation may be very useful for the audience.

• Talk about all aspects of the final report.

• It is suggested, but not required, that you run your presentation from the web site, since the information has to be presented there anyway. This also ensures that the presentation will work the same way from different computers. If you are using software besides a web browser in your presentation, you must discuss it with the instructor(s) at least a week beforehand so that we can set up time to make sure it will work properly on the class computer, using the instructor's login name.

• Use pictures and point form notes (e.g. show figures describing entities and their important attributes, rather than listing the entities; show the conceptual model flow chart and talk about it: you should include a point form text description of it on the website, but during the oral presentation you can put up the flow chart and discuss it directly).

• Your notes should outline your talk, not give the full text of everything you will be saying; this will help avoid the temptation of reading the screen. Talk to the audience instead of reading.

• Show maps/images of intermediate processing steps or external analysis results. (e.g. show a picture of land cover or of runoff hydrographs or census maps of important input variables for computing demographic indices).

• Use point form rather than paragraphs; paragraphs are hard to read by the audience.

• Do not discuss technical specifics (e.g. data dictionaries and attribute linkages) unless they caused problems with the solution and you want to highlight them.

• Spend at least 1/3 of the time on your results and explaining and interpreting the results.

• The presentation will be assessed based on:

• Oral communication, respecting time limit.
• Content/coverage of problem.
• Visual communication.