New friends… and death by PowerPoint!

Travelled to Brussels from London on Eurostar, and I made 12 new friends! I taught them for 3 days. Though I taught in English, they all spoke Flemish or French. Luckily, though, their English was pretty good, and we had very few communication problems. Apart from the manuals, that is. My subject is a fairly technical server, and the course runs 3 days. The manuals are written in North America, and are full of what you would expect - long names for simple things, collapsed into acronyms. The students have to write a test, too. Though its open book, they struggle with double negatives, such as "which of the following are not true?".. followed by possible answers such as, "to disable the do not send feature...."... Can you see how confusing that could be to someone who does not speak English as their first language? My course writers don’t, and I have given up trying to convince them that this kind of thing does our company no good.

Anyway, the Belgian people are really really friendly, and they have a fantastic sense of humour! For instance, at one point I made one or two mistakes in my presentation (followed by the correct information of course ) , and I teach a Server where users are added to this server. So of course, when I made my mistake/s, they asked "where is the Server setting to REPLACE INSTRUCTOR!"

We had a good laugh over the 3days, I really believe it keeps them interested , and they learn more if some humour is about . They also relax, and they feel at ease to contribute. (I hope)

Slides galore - Do you hate powerpoint? ... me too. I kid you not, my North American writers sometimes make 140 slides for one day's training. ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTY ! These slides are mostly text, too. Not many are diagrams. So I teach like this: Present the topic in my style, (animated and interactive), they get given some stuff to do on their PCs, about the topic I am teaching, we might do a flip chart or White board diagram, and THEN we zoom through the slides to see if we missed anything, or to look at diagrams that confirm what we have learned. I have heard a saying before: "death by PowerPoint", and I try to avoid that. Many people make the mistake of taking "preparing their presentation" to mean "spend hours on your slideshow". Well, the training or the presentation is NOT about the slideshow, its about the SPEAKER, and how they lead the audience to a point or a discovery.

The following are great speakers:
Bill Clinton
Nelson Mandela
Adolf Hitler

Did you ever see any of them using Powerpoint?