It’s time to flip your business meeting model. The norms for teaching and presenting information in the classroom are making a 180-degree about face, and this change has tremendous implications for business leaders. When Generation Z – the Internet generation – enters the workforce, their expectations for business presentations will be drastically different from those today. If you don’t change with them, no one is going to pay attention to you anymore.
The Flipped Classroom
To update Mustang Firmware: 1 Connect your Mustang to your computer's USB port and open the Fender FUSE software. Download Fuse Driver. Software Terms: Distiller, Document Conversion, Formatted Text, Printer Driver, Publisher, Text Documents, Text Driver, Text.
Robert Heitmeier, general manager of PolyVision, a teaching and learning technology company, explained to me that the old norm for teaching was the “sage on the stage” delivering lectures and then students working through that thinking as homework.
The old norm for business presenting was “death by PowerPoint,” with a presenter standing in front of a darkened room sharing (or reading slide-by-slide) information. A typical one-hour meeting would be scheduled for 45 minutes of presentation, followed by 15 minutes of questions. Unfortunately, those meetings would typically start five minutes late and the presenter would run 10 minutes over, squeezing out all the questions.
Polyvision Fuse Software Update
Easy access to video is changing the way people teach and learn. In what’s referred to as the “flipped classroom” model, students watch lectures at home before class, and then work through the thinking together in the classroom. This model will alter peoples’ expectations of business presentations as well, switching the bias to sharing information before the meeting so that the meeting can focus on meaningful conversation.
Don’t wait.
The Flipped Business Meeting
There are only four things people do in a meeting: learn, contribute, decide or waste time. The highest value activity is deciding, followed by contributing based on learning. The takeaway from the flipped classroom model is that information sharing can happen outside of the meeting to free time for information digesting and application in the meeting, as a group.
Of course learning is an important use of time. It’s just that people learn in different ways. As Heitmeier puts it,
“When you have to retain the attention of auditory, visual, kinesthetic and tactile learners simultaneously, one way of presenting or teaching is futile. Presenters must learn to embrace these different ways rather than dismiss them.”
Let people absorb information on their own before meetings so you can use meeting time for conversations, contribution and decisions.
Emerging Technologies for Business Presentations
PolyVision’s interactive whiteboards and tools enable all sorts of interactive learning in classrooms, across classrooms and in areas where there are no classrooms. They are out in front of the mobile wave described in my earlierinterview with MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor. PolyVision is creating “we” spaces described in my column on how office layout impacts culture.
Businesses evolve on a continuous basis. We’re all new leaders all the time, adjusting to our evolving world. This change in how we learn is significant. Generation Z grew up with technology right along side their Sippy cups. This generation is already learning differently in schools and they certainly will not sit still for boring PowerPoint presentations. If you don’t flip the way you communicate before they enter the workplace, you will never have a chance to connect and engage with them.
Polyvision Fuse-dv303 Software
This is a good example of step 5 of The New Leader’s Playbook: Drive Action by Activating and Directing an Ongoing Communication Network (Including Social Media)
Everything communicates. You can either make choices in advance about what and how you’re going to communicate or react to what others do. It is important to discover your own message and be clear on your platform for change, vision, and call to action before you start trying to inspire others. It will evolve as you learn, but you can’t lead unless you have a starting point to help focus those learning plans. Identify your target audiences. Craft and leverage your core message and master narrative. Monitor and adjust as appropriate on an ongoing basis.
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The New Leader’s Playbook includes the 10 steps that executive onboarding group PrimeGenesis uses to help new leaders and their teams get done in 100-days what would normally take six to twelve months. George Bradt is PrimeGenesis’ managing director, and co-author of The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan (Wiley, 3rd edition 2011) and the freemium iPad app New Leader Smart Tools. Follow him at @georgebradt or on YouTube.
The advent of the document camera marked the end of an era for the transparency machine. I can still remember coming home from teaching in the document camera's earliest days and rejoicing that my fingertips weren't stained with ink from having to use them as an eraser.
My document camera actually has become one of my most essential tools for direct instruction, as it has for my students when they get to share their own work or present creative ideas to the class. But as grateful as I am for my document camera, which I've been using happily for years, two problems have always annoyed me:
- Its video quality was always inadequate;
- Its still-image quality was always hit-or-miss.
It seems that the lighting is never quite right for making a high-contrast, clean image, especially when capturing a page or two from a book.
And then, just when I was about to accept these inadequacies, I discovered PolyVision's new fuse. They call it a 'multifunction digital visualizer'; I call it 'document cam 2.0.' It's all I've ever wanted in a document camera. In addition to ratcheting up the video quality to 30 frames per second and ramping up the screen resolution to a whopping 1080p, the fuse comes with proprietary TrueSnap technology that automates the alignment and document cleanup processes to enhance your screen captures. I had to see it for myself, so I asked for a demonstration on the show floor.
First, we captured an image with the fuse. The result looked like every other image I had ever taken with a document camera: black words against a grey background. I then saved the image so I could compare it to my next picture.
Next, we enabled TrueSnap from the onscreen software interface and snapped another still image. This time, the contrast was striking and anything but washed out. The black text popped from the white background - and I mean popped! The software also realigned the image, eliminating the need to line it up perfectly before snapping a screen shot! It even 'unfolded' the page and miraculously removed the curvature of the book's spine to create a totally flattened image.
In fact, the resulting image almost looked like a real document from a word processing program; I say 'almost' because it's not quite there … yet. The black didn't look as sharp and defined as I expected it would. In particular, the letters looked a bit too soft around the edges. Nonetheless, fuse is a huge improvement in the document camera space.
The bad news: You'll have to wait until the fall to get one because it won't ship until Sept. 1 or later. What's more, once you've seen it, you'll become a bit of a document camera snob and possibly develop a condition I call 'fuse envy.'
But There's More...
Something else that caught my attention at the PolyVision booth was the company's solution for audio support. When I first walked by its eno interactive whiteboard display, I heard music playing, which isn't unusual: At a show like ISTE, there's music and loud talking everywhere you turn.
What was unusual was that the sound was actually emanating from the interactive whiteboard itself. One of PolyVision's booth attendants noticed my curiosity, so he urged me to touch the board. It was pulsing!
The company came up with a way to provide full-room sound quality from a single source, a solution it's calling eno play.
Slated for release on Sept. 1, eno play is a built-in, fully optimized amplifier. Its surround-sound effect can be created without any additional wiring or classroom modification. Plus, there are no visible speakers or amplifier. The 'exciter' technology on the back of the eno board eliminates components, thus transforming the board into its own speaker system! Remarkable. You can plug in up to two sound devices through its two 1/8-inch stereo input jacks.
To find out which PolyVision interactive whiteboards support eno play, visit: polyvision.com/support/faqs/eno-play.
Polyvision Fuse Software
These audio and visual solutions are definitely worth a second look.
For more ISTE coverage, get the full picture in the ISTE 2011 Wrap-up.
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