Recently, I’ve been speaking at a number of different conferences, some education, some tech, some business. The challenge with each is to come up with a unique and interesting presentation that will be engaging and beneficial to the audience. With three quite different audiences, you can’t just do one presentation and expect it be suitable for everyone. Instead, you need to understand your audience and through doing so, shape your presentation so that it’s beneficial to them. After all, the presentation is not about you or for you. It’s for them! You are merely acting as the guide to help them learn and lead them on their own path, (very Jedi in training style).
 
With that in mind, the first thing you need to do is research your audience. What’s their background? What interests do they have? What expectations might they have in going to a conference or going to hear someone speak? When you understand the needs of your audience, you now have a platform from which to build a useful presentation.
 
If it is a conference, there’s often a theme to it, which is also important to recognise. If you’re presenting something that’s way outside this theme, it can be disjointed and can fail to meet the expectations of those attending. However, if you can, it’s also worth looking at what other speakers are covering and avoiding repetition as that can be problematic too and your presentation has to be way better than theirs.
 
Once you have a couple of the basics sorted, then it’s time to put together some of the following, so that it’s engaging and interesting and so that your audience doesn’t feel like throwing the free pens at you.
 
Consider the following:
 
Experience – anecdotal evidence and personal experiences told in an interesting way can be a fantastic way to engage the audience and hold attention from the outset. The more interesting you can be, the more effective your presentation will come across. Start with a story to get everyone involved. At one conference, I started with the story of the student who took a superman dive in a bed of oysters… At this point they’re either excited to hear what happened next, or cringing and wanting you to stop… Don’t stop, it’s too late already for that!
 
Linkages – Build this story and have a point to it. Link it back to the theme topic or core problem your experience or knowledge-base of the audience would have already. For example, if you’re talking about how you innovated to a group of businessmen and women, link this back to how this process of innovation can be replicated in their businesses. If you’re talking about how a student managed to superman dive into a bed of oysters, then link it back to student management, risk management and first aid. The linkages provide a clear and relevant connection with how this information could be useful to participants.
 
Powerpoints Slides – The best thing to do if you have a power point or keynote “thingy” to go with your presentation is to just have a single image or a slide with a couple of key bullet points - nothing more! Most importantly, don’t read your slides!!!! This annoys people and they will start throwing the pens at you. Hence, don’t do it, unless you’re prepared for the incoming volley.
 
Longer Presentations & Workshops – The longer the presentation, the more important it is you vary it up and add in practice activities or group discussions from which the audience can interact with each other and have a break from the presenter. Again, it’s because the session is about them and not you that this is so important. Link the activity and the results of that, back into your presentation.
 
Practise – Before doing your presentation you need to practise it! Stand in front of a mirror and run through your speech. Know how each section should run and for how long it should run. There’s always an intro, a main body and a conclusion and you will always have a time limit. Practise it and stick to your time limit. Be prepared to drop sections on the run if you have to cut down on the time to ensure you finish the session on time. Practice also enables you to have better contact and engagement with the audience.
 
Eye Contact – This is critical! Eye contact is about building trust and building a relationship. If you want people to trust you and what you’re saying, you need to be able to engage with them effectively and let them see your eyes. If you’re just reading off a piece of paper, this breaks the relationship and is ineffective. Look around the room. Make a point of presenting to each part of the room as you scan throughout the presentation. Nobody knows what you’re going to say, but people quickly understand how you’re going to say it, if you don’t make eye contact with them. Again, the risk of pens flying at you is a real possibility.
 
Powerful Conclusion – Many presentations fizzle out. They lack a punch. They lack a point. They lack a powerful action step moving forward. Think about what is a really important take away for your audience! Are they looking to upskill on a certain topic or area? Are they worried about something that’s new in terms of legislation, responsibility, legal duty or a new way of doing something or thinking that they’re now willing to try? If so, challenge them to do this. Take action, take a risk, do something about it. Again, it comes down to the fact that the presentation is about the audience and improving their lives, not about you. Leave them with something to think about and get moving on to actually do.
 
If you can build these few steps into a presentation that you’re doing, then you’ll be way ahead of most presenters already and you won’t have to protect yourself from the flying pens. If these pointers aren’t enough or too much, then just think of it this way. If someone’s given up 30 minutes of their time to listen to you speak, then you need to make that 30 minutes of their life a valuable and memorable one. Nobody remembers boring speakers, so don’t be a boring speaker. Make it fun, make it worthwhile and make it memorable. Because if you can do that, then that’s a session I want to be sitting in and listening to you.

​At Xcursion, we are often asked questions about data security and sovereignty. Not the most exciting question, but an important one all the same. With student medical records, security is a must. However, what do most schools currently do? They tend to either use paper printouts, which are really hard to track and I’ve seen folders of these go missing a number of times. No security, no track, no idea where that highly confidential information ended up.
 
Others use email and things such as dropbox or google drive to share medical information for camps. Whilst this is a slight step up from leaving a folder around, it is in fact still not a suitable way of data management. Once you share something on google drive or dropbox, there’s every chance that the information on that drive isn’t located in your country of origin, which is important when it comes to student medical records, which in most counties need to be stored only in that country of origin.
 
You then still have the same problem once you’re heading out for school sport, school excursions or activities. How are you going to safely carry and use the information you need? Most of the time we’re back to using print outs, which can contain students home addresses, medical issues and a range of other private healthcare and personal information which needs to be protected.

This was a problem we faced years ago before we developed the Xcursion mobile app. Data security was literally non-existent for our school programs and we needed a way to easily, securely and effectively access that information and use it when it’s needed. The rest of the time, we wanted it locked away and secure from transfer or loss. Therefore, we encrypted our entire Xcursion mobile app platform and databases to ensure that all of our client data was secure and hosted in their country of origin. This way we were able to provide much better data security than before and ensure the most important information was both secure and accessible anytime a teacher needed it for any sort of medication administration, incident report or just a quick call to parents to let them know everything was ok.
 
How are you securing your information? As experienced teachers, we know how hard it is to keep up with so many responsibilities in and out of school, so if you’d like us to help you make medical information more secure and easier to manage for all your school excursions, school sports and activities, then get in touch today. 

‘We’ve got that covered,’ are often the famous last words of people who under-estimate what’s needed in terms of risk management and who are also over-confident in their ability to deliver. Unfortunately, I’ve seen this so often in schools where people think they have everything covered, that risk management is just an annoying document or ‘it’s someone else’s job to do that.’ The reality is that, one, it’s everyone’s job. Two, nobody else can do it for you and three copy and pasting someone else’s mistakes leaves you liable to their lack of ability to assess and implement good risk management, leaving massive holes in everything.
 
I’ve also seen schools going down the path of employing someone to do all the risk assessments for them. Now this is problematic on a number of levels. One, I could write endless risk assessments and be confident that we’ve minimised our foreseeable risks and have documented it well. However, that’s like me taking a driving test for someone else. I know I can drive, but can they? What actual understanding of risk do teachers have and why are there still so many issues with risk management?
 
The fact is that unfortunately, the majority of teachers have never had any training in risk management. They’re suddenly expected to know how to write a risk assessment for school excursions, without any training whatsoever. I’ve had some people say to me, ‘But our teachers know how to manage students, so they’re ok.’ I’ve never understood this, as being able to manage a group of students in a classroom, is fine, but risk management for school excursions and activities is far more complex than this and there’s so many considerations and random factors which play into good risk management. These go well-beyond the ability to count the number of students you have with you and make sure they stay together.
 
Risk management training is critically important for all teachers to have. Whilst it does take time and experience to fully develop these skills, there needs to be a solid foundation of training and understanding so that teachers can become good risk managers which helps them in the classroom, on the sports field and wherever else their excursions, international tours and programs may take them.
 
As a starting point, we decided to take our 20 plus years of experience in school risk management and distil it into a 3 hour training course to help teachers develop a solid understanding of risk and risk management and what they need to do when taking any group for a school excursion or activity. How to write a risk assessment for school excursions is like risk management 101 for teachers. It covers everything to get started so they can run safe school excursions and activities for their students.
 
Professional development for teachers is extremely important for their ongoing development. It’s not just classroom practice they need to develop, but all those other skills to ensure they’re keeping their students safe.

Schools are busy places. There’s a lot more going on these days than just a few classes each day. The significantly greater expectation of schools and parents for teachers to be doing more and more, at time makes this job quite unattractive as the hours which end up going into the job start to feel incompatible with the goal and educational aim of the role.
 
Due to the often inexplicably high workload, many new teachers are leaving the profession quite early, within the first two years, as the expectations and sheer volume of work which extends beyond the classroom continues to increase. Added to this, with a world that’s filled with noise and distraction and constant competing demands for our attention, it’s hard to find the space and air to breathe to put all of this in perspective.
 
I’ve often wondered, why with improvements in technology are people’s lives and especially teachers’ lives having less and less time? Are they really engaged in beneficial work? Or are they engaged in busywork as a substitute for any real productivity? If you look at some aspects of a teacher’s job these days, some parents are expecting teachers to be doing parenting for them. Whilst this is not always the case, there’s enough under-parenting going around that the time it takes for a teacher to provide support and care for students is ever increasing. Even if it’s just a few students, each problem takes time and energy to work through and provide support.
 
I think it’s important that schools provide a caring atmosphere, but there needs to be a clear line where parents should be taking a level of responsibility themselves and not relying on teachers to do it all for them. Again, this is one more job on top of classroom teaching, which is a core business.
 
Then there’s all the co-curricular activities. Schools are finally realising that experiential education is a great way of learning and having a wide range of experiences and opportunities is really importing in life. However, instead of thoughtfully building this into the school program, it’s just added on top of what’s already a significant workload. It would be far better to integrate co-curricular programs into mainstream education, rather than putting them on top of other things. They’re really important ways of learning and probably more enjoyable than most classroom lessons, so why not build them into the day and not just add them on top?
 
Then there’s the emails. Whilst a really convenient way of communicating, I have no idea why parents need to be emailing teachers. If there’s a problem, then a student should go and talk with the teacher themselves. Whenever I’ve had emails from parents, I tend to view the majority of them as pointless and something that their child could and should be addressing themselves. Yet teachers are now accessible all the time and with blurred or non-existent work boundaries, this can mean that teachers spend far more time at work and doing unproductive ‘stuff’ rather than focusing on what’s important. As a result, the standard of teaching drops as you can’t be everything to everyone.
 
One more nail in the coffin of productivity are meetings. It’s not just schools which love their meetings. Many organisations are obsessed by them, yet they’re one of the most unproductive things you can do in a work place. For example the weekly staff meeting. Most of this is a complete load of rubbish. It enables people to talk more than they should and a one hour meeting can easily blow out to two. One dreadful and pointless one I was in once went for four hours!!! Literally nothing was said or achieved other than the fact that two of my colleagues and I went out for lunch immediately afterwards and all decided to resign. The cost of that four hour meeting? Over $200,000 in lost productivity, lost staff, rehiring costs and long-term loss of cultural and experiential knowledge.
 
Whilst most weekly meetings aren’t as expensive as this, it does cost a lot of money to run a single one hour meeting. Say your school has 100 staff all required to be at a one hour meeting. That’s 100 hours of collective work wasted and at $50 per hour staffing costs, you’ve just wasted $5,000! Was that one hour meeting worth it?
 
The risk of endless hours and growing expectations in schools, means that in lieu of a clear purposeful and productive teaching and learning which keeps staff engaged and invigorated through poor planning and management, they instead get dragged down into more pointless noise and busywork as a substitute for productivity. At the end of the day, what are the aims of the school? If something doesn’t fit into those aims, then it shouldn’t be done.
 
Being clear about this helps build morale and a sense of purpose. Teachers are generally passionate people who want the best for their students, but if they spend fifty to eighty hours a week drowning in the noise, then you can hardly expect good educational outcomes as a result. This year, look at what’s important and what’s just busywork. By taking the time to eliminate as much of this busy work as possible, you’re well on the way to ensuring happier staff and far better outcomes for students.