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In most Toastmasters clubs the speech Timer communicates with the speaker via a “traffic light” box. For a 5-to-7 minute speech the bottom, green light is turned on after 5 minutes. The middle yellow light replaces it after 6 minutes. Finally the top red light is turned on after 7 minutes, and the speaker has 30 seconds to wrap up. Currently Toastmasters sells two models of manual traffic lights - the $65 #6997 and the $185 #7010. Great Timer sells a programmable LED timer for $229.
Last October a post on the TM Visions blog (from District 55) described an inexpensive alternative. It is a multicolor (color changing) LED light bulb controlled by an infrared remote. They assembled $25 kits with a lamp socket and cord and supplied them to twenty of their clubs. You can find similar bulbs and floodlights at Amazon, and they also can be found on eBay. The single bulb could fit into almost any desk lamp. These bulbs are an interesting alternative to flags or the Toastmasters #901 timing cards. A bulb is useless without the remote, so a spare battery also belongs in the kit. For now I’m going to keep using our foam flags.
While I was looking on Amazon I found another interesting $30 product called the American Innovative Lecture Timer and Roadshow Travel Alarm. (Toastmasters sells it as their item #6801). First, it is a travel alarm clock. Second, it has a row of six colored LEDs that provide a bar chart of the elapsed fraction of time for a speech. It is small enough to put on any lectern. But, what if the speaker doesn’t stand behind there? Why can’t we show the speaker a similar bar graph of where he is relative to his allotted time?
The display shown above, of a box with a row of seven lights turned on at one-minute intervals, is one way this could be done. A row of cards or blocks would serve the same function. Imagine giant Scrabble tiles in a holder, or a row of seven flip cards.
UPDATE
In a post on March 1, 2011 I discussed a speech about Timing Tiles.
Back in 1888 Mark Twain said that:
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter -- it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
I dislike the word immutable, although the marketing guru Al Ries has used it in the title of three different books, starting in 1994 with The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. That word immediately reminds me of the MUTE button on the remote control for my television. Once I pick it up my remote, no channel is immutable! I prefer the synonym of unchangeable.
The MUTE button has an unusual history. Most TV remote control technology came first from the Zenith Corporation. Back in 1950 they first sold sets with the Lazy Bones - a wired remote for changing channels, which gave birth to the couch potato. Later on Zenith developed wireless remotes.
In 1952 my uncle Howard developed the first MUTE button - a wired remote he sold for $2.98 as the Blab-Off. It could easily be added to almost any TV set in just a few minutes. His daughter Laura has told the story here.
The Blab-Off consisted of a 20-foot length of lamp cord with a rotary switch on one end, and a pair of crocodile clips on the other. To install it you just had to open the set up and cut one of the wires going to the speaker. Then you stripped a little of the insulation, attached the clips, and hammered an insulated staple into the wood cabinet to keep the clips from being pulled away and disconnecting the remote.
According to Time magazine ads for the Blab-Off were rejected by the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the New Yorker magazine. Then the New York Mirror accepted one, and Walter Winchell mentioned the Blab-Off on his national TV show. Reader’s Digest magazine published a two-page article about the Blab-Off in November 1953, and sales took off. Now it was clear that many consumers were upset by loud, obnoxious commercials, and wanted to be able to mute them.
In 1955 Zenith developed the Flashmatic, an optical remote control using four photocells placed just beyond the corners of the screen. When you pointed a flashlight at them you could turn the set on or off, change channels, and mute the sound. In 1956 they developed the Space Command ultrasonic remote which could turn the set on or off, change channels, and control the volume. That ultrasonic remote didn’t even need batteries - the tones were generated by hammers striking aluminum rods (like little tuning forks). Later on came much more complicated remotes using pulsed infrared.
Really? What could possibly be new in flipcharts? Haven’t they been around almost forever for public speaking and other presentations.
Well, there now are some pads with an interesting combination of built-in tabletop easels and twenty self-stick pages that you can tear off and put on walls or whiteboards. That’s almost as great as the candy combination of peanut butter surrounded by chocolate in cups. Most conference or meeting rooms have an extra table or chair that could hold a little easel.
Self-stick pages that you can put up of a wall are a great idea for planning and brainstorming. I could have used them last year for collecting suggestions during the annual Toastmasters club quality evaluation presentation called Moments of Truth.
If your room has whiteboards, there also are plastic pages that can cling either to them or to walls via static electricity. You can write on them with the same erasable markers for whiteboards, so these pages can be used over and over.
The first image is from Raimond Spekking and the second is from FEMA.
Long, narrow rooms can be some of the most disappointing places for a speaker. Dr. Paul Radde has discussed how they may come from using movable walls to split hotel ballrooms into four to eight thin slivers.
The result may remind you either of a bowling alley, or the interior of an airplane. If the speaker doesn’t plan ahead, then the seating will be arranged like the coach section of an airliner (with the speaker standing forlornly at the front end). This is ineffective.
In a brief article on his Thrival Systems web site Dr. Radde discusses a better, J Shape, seating arrangement. (Click on the Articles tab, and then click on Optimizing the Narrow Room). He suggests instead that the chairs should be set to the long wall. Put two aisles at 45 degrees. Curve the seat rows so the audience can see both the speaker and each other.
You can read more about his seating strategies for meetings in his 175-page book, Seating Matters, or in an 8-page handout from a SpeakerNet News teleseminar. You also can read two briefer magazine articles here, and here.
Dr. Radde has devised five general principles for seating:
1. Set to the long side of the room. No bowling alley!
2. Flare aisles off the podium at 45 degrees to the back exits. No center aisle!
3. Face each chair toward the presentation. No straight rows!
4. Cut single chair access lanes (every 6th or 7th chair) into long rows.
5. For breakout or concurrent sessions, set the last row on the back wall.
A speaker still may encounter some rather bizarre boardroom layouts. Lisa Braithwaite has blogged about two where the Ceremonial Center Table presumably was permanently fastened to the floor.
Before you begin a public speaking engagement you should get to know the room. Every room is unique. What you don’t know may surprise you later. Also don’t forget to check other features of the building, like locations of restrooms and water fountains.
The Capitol Club Toastmasters meet just after noon on Wednesdays. We use the Cedars Conference Room at the Boise Housing and Community Development building The U-shaped seating layout for our meetings is shown above. With two people per table we can fit an audience of 16 club members. When we have more than that, we can easily add rows of tables at the back, as I have shown above for 24 people.
This room is L-shaped, about 28 feet wide by 50 feet deep. It is small enough and live enough that we don’t need a public address system. Double entry doors at the front are near the front entrance for the building. The left wall has windows with vertical blinds for light control. Near the back of the left wall is an exit door, which we usually ignore.
There are whiteboards along the front wall. The ceiling has chandeliers and recessed spotlights. The right wall has an 8-foot table for literature, food, or drinks. A supply of 1.5-foot by 6- foot tables and stacking chairs are stored along the back wall, so the seating arrangements can easily be changed to fit different groups for meetings or classes. There sometimes is an easel for flip charts stored along the back wall.
A table at the front holds our lectern, and has room for a laptop computer and projector for PowerPoint presentations. We use the whiteboards on the front wall instead of a flip chart, and also as a projection screen.
With the chandeliers off we can display PowerPoint, when the slides have dark letters on a light background. Those whiteboards are not reflective enough to provide good contrast for light letters on a dark background.
Once the front entrance to the building was blocked for repainting. That day we got in via the side exit door. During our meeting so did four confused visitors looking for the way to the front desk. Fortunately the Toastmaster that day worked at a credit union and had excellent customer relations skills. Maxine calmly greeted each of them, and then directed them out the entrance doors.
A kitchen is adjacent to the back of the conference room. It is used by Life’s Kitchen, a food-service training program for at-risk young adults. They run a Cafe that serves lunch in another room in the building. Their young employees almost never interrupt our meetings with outbursts like on the TV show Hell’s Kitchen.
For PowerPoint I bring a file box containing my laptop computer and projector, with the connecting cable, and a remote control. I also bring an extension cord to plug into the outlet at the center of the front wall and run to to the front of the table next to the lectern. A three-way adapter plugs into the extension cord. A small 2x4” wood block raises the front of the projector so the top of the image is near the top of the whiteboard and visible to the entire audience. The speakers on my laptop computer are not loud enough to fill the room. When I need audio, I also bring along a boombox radio with an auxiliary input jack, and a connecting cable to the headphone output on the laptop.
Probably not. You could easily pull a speech out of a library book, or just buy one on the web. But, should you? If you don’t do anything to make it your own, it probably will sound tinny and leave a bad taste in your audience’s mouth.
I have just one book of model speeches on my shelf. So far I haven’t used any of them. Someday, in a public speaking emergency, I might use one as a starting point. After all, something would be better than nothing.
On December 21st I watched the total lunar eclipse from the driveway of my house. The weather forecast had been for partly cloudy, but the sky cleared about 1-1/2 hours before it began. At midnight the temperature was barely above freezing.
I tried to photograph it through a telescope, but you can see that was not very successful. What went wrong? Well, like what can happen for public speaking, I was just winging it. On short notice I grabbed some pieces that had worked for me once before on a warm day. But, I didn’t rehearse or plan ahead, so I did not see what should have been there but wasn’t. Doesn't that sound familiar?
When you point a camera at the moon you find that it looks pretty small. I magnified it about fifty times with a spotting telescope mounted on a tripod (Manfrotto 190 with #410 Junior geared head). My camera had a photo eyepiece originally meant for a microscope, with an aluminum adapter to make it fit on the telescope. The magnified image kept moving out of view though.
As shown above, my digital camera is a Nikon Coolpix E995 that fits into a coat pocket. The body is in two pieces that can swivel. The left side contains a recessed zoom lens and optical viewfinder. The right side has the controls and an LCD display. Usually I keep the camera set for both auto-focus and auto-exposure.
Less than what is recorded shows on the optical viewfinder, so I normally check my framing on the LCD display, and zoom in until I like the image. Having the LCD display on runs down the battery fairly quickly, so normally I also set the camera to automatically shut off after a minute (and carry a spare battery). The LCD display can be turned off and on by pushing the little MONITOR button, but that’s not easy to do in the dark with gloves on.
The telescope gets focused by turning a ring on the front. Auto-focus on the camera doesn’t help. I set the camera to focus far-away by pushing the button at the lower left (with the mountain symbol). To avoid vibration from pushing the shutter button I had to use a plug-in remote control, as shown above. (The built-in timer only works together with the close-up setting, which is the flower symbol). After midnight I gave up on taking pictures, and just watched through the regular telescope eyepiece.
What did I forget? I have an AC adapter for the camera, and it would have been easy to run an extension cord out from the garage. Then I could have left the LCD display on, and easily kept the moon centered just by occasionally adjusting the pan and tilt knobs on the tripod.
