Career & Technical Education (CTE) Program

In the modern workplace, presenting your work is critical skill–and how it’s done can make or break the way your ideas are received. Whether it’s in person or online, sharing your thoughts and discoveries through dynamic presentations allows for productive collaboration and communication. Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the world’s most popular tools for creating and presenting presentations with ease. To begin the journey towards being a masterful presenter, we’ll first introduce the core functionality of PowerPointand then cover the basics of creating, editing, and presenting a slideshow. Best of all, you’ll learn how to collaborate with others and utilize different PowerPoint tools and views to your advantage.

What will you learn in this unit?

• Create a PowerPoint document
• Format the appearance and layout of PowerPoint slides
• Collaborate and share PowerPoint projects with others
• Utilize different views available in PowerPoint

You’ve successfully learned how to create a PowerPoint presentation, but it’s going to take more than that to really succeed in the workplace—you need to make your presentations shine. No matter what your profession, getting to the top is an art form, and presenting your ideas powerfully is most certainly no exception to this rule. Get ready to discover the art of design and how to make your presentation one to remember!

What will you learn in this unit?

• Draw on design principles when creating a PowerPoint presentation
• Format text and WordArt in a slideshow
• Create and format shapes and images in a slideshow
• Order and group objects on a slide
• Import a Word Outline to create a slideshow

How did your pitch deck go? If you didn’t get the investment or support you were looking for, you may have learned that though the“gift of the gab” is useful to help get people excited about your idea, charisma will only get you so far! In today’s competitive marketplace, investors are justifiably careful about investing their time and money wisely. If they are going to invest in your business, or contribute their time to supporting you, they want to see data that backs up your claims that this idea is going to be a success. How can you include such detailed information in your short presentations? Let’s start by exploring charts, graphs, and tables.

What will you learn in this unit?

• Understand various types of business metrics
• Create, import, and style tables, charts, and graphs in PowerPoint
• Choose the best chart for a given scenario
• Manipulate data in a PowerPoint table, chart, and graph

Getting a project off the ground is exhausting and exhilarating. Fundraising, getting your initial product out there, coming up with brand concepts, names, designs, and creating your own organization makes it feel like this is it.’ But it can be easy to forget that your vision and aims were always much bigger than a start-up. So take a step back and consider what happens next: hiring staff, training them to do a good job, and managing them effectively as your organization grows. Perhaps, over the last few units, you’ve started to see PowerPointprimarilyas a tool used for fundraising and marketing your business. But really, the most common use of PowerPoint is a tool for effective internal communication, sharing information quickly, clearly, and effectively.

What will you learn in this unit?

• Perform the leadership roles of a team leader
• Communicate effectively with others
• Create, insert, and format SmartArt Graphics
• Convert lists to SmartArt graphics

You’ve created some impressive presentations thus far. PowerPoint has enabled you to create traditional presentations, reports, infographics, and pitch decks. If your personal project has taken off as successfully as ourLangwitchventure, then at this point you have a team of people who are receiving regular presentations from you. Sometimes, they may even be tuning in from afar as they travel on business. In your own pitches, you’re now playing in the big leagues and making presentations to people who’ve literally seen it all. To keep your employees engaged, and those investors impressed, you can turbocharge your presentations by utilizingPowerPoint’s multimedia capabilities. Why not fully engage your audience’s senses by utilizing audio and video to create an immersive environment? Now, we’ll not only bring you to the cutting edge, but we’ll also prepare you for the future of presentation.

What will you learn in this unit?

• Design a multimedia presentation
• Include sound effects in a presentation
• Insert and configure video in a presentation
• Identify new presentation technologies

Sometimes people describe being bored like“watching paint dry.”It’s challenging and tiring being around some lifeless force, and you don’t want your presentations to be part of that problem! Instead, you can use animations to spruce things up and keep real information entertaining. Whether it’s adding transitions with special effects and sounds between slides or even within the slide itself, animation can be a powerful tool for perfecting your presentation’s professionality, developing business connections, and generally wowing the socks off of your audience.

What will you learn in this unit?

• Apply slide transitions including timing and effects
• Animate slide objects such as text and shapes
• Sequence, order, group, and time multiple animations
• Utilize a motion path in an animated object

Designing presentations, public speaking, pitching, onboarding, prototyping,animation—you’ve done it all. It’s time to step into the real world again and take a presentation through the full gamut of concept creation, content creation, design, rehearsal and presentation. While you may already know almost everything we will cover in this final capstone project, applied knowledge is just a little bit different and much more powerful, than theory and practice.

What will you learn in this unit?

• Apply final formatting to a presentation
• Evaluate and plan a presentation’s approach and form
• Proof a presentation for publication
• Protect a presentation for sharing

Throughout this course, you’ve learned how to use PowerPoint to effectively communicate with everyone except those that really count–your customers!. In this final unit, you can learn about the marketing process and the teamwork that is required to pull it all off. As we conclude this course, you can also pick up some tips for marketing yourself, and preparing for a bright career ahead.

What will you learn in this unit?

• Build a marketing plan and materials
• Market and manage a personal online presence
• Effectively work in, manage, and lead a team
• Evaluate a presentation’s success

Technology

• Microsoft Office (or Office 365 subscription)
• Audio recording device
• Video recording device
• Audio and Video recording capabilities for computing device that runs PowerPoint (student will record themselves giving a presentation)