Whiteboards or flipcharts are more powerful than PowerPoint for a boardroom presentation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At her Maniactive blog on July 18, 2023 Laura Bergells has a post titled Ditch Your Slides! Draw on the Power of Whiteboard Talks. She describes the impact of a whiteboard talk (rather than the PowerPoint you might use in a larger room) these four ways:

 

Showcase your personality

Amplify engagement

Visual storytelling

Flexibility and adaptability

 

With a small audience you can do a more spontaneous and interactive presentation by drawing on a whiteboard or blackboard. But a flipchart is arguably better than either, since you can answer questions by going back to a previously drawn page.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no magic rewind button on a blackboard or whiteboard. One you erase, it is only a memory.  

 

Back on October 21, 2019 I blogged about the Impact of audience size on presentation style. And way back on January 16, 2008 at The Extreme Presentation Method Andrew Abela blogged about Ballroom vs. Conference Room Style Presentations. A large (ballroom) versus small (conference room or boardroom) is a useful distinction for venues.

 

On July 15, 2015 I blogged about Is a small audience one where the speaker doesn’t need a microphone? In that post I mentioned that:

 

“There are two types of people – those who divide things into two categories, and those who don’t.”

 

I belong to the second type, and mentioned different audience sizes classified by powers of 2 from zero (two people conversing, perhaps in a phone booth) to twenty (a visit from the Pope with an audience of 1,048,576).  

 

My two images were modified from those of a boardroom and a historical blackboard at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Using blackboards for teaching mathematics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blackboards have been used as visual aids to teach mathematics for over two centuries, but now are being replaced by newer whiteboards. The May 2021 issue of Scientific American has a web page with an article by Clara Moskowitz titled The Art of Mathematics in Chalk. (The hard copy version on pages 66 to 75 instead is titled Chalkboard Art).

 

There is a series of seven striking images  by Jessica Wynne titled: Isoperimetry, Mixed Gaussians, Branching Waves, Out for a Walk, Organized Chaos, Matching Shapes, and A Collaboration. The text with the image about topology (Matching Shapes) notes that a donut and coffee cup are considered to have the same shape (a single hole), as can be illustrated via an animated gif.  

 

The image with four blackboards at the Helsinki University of Technology came from user Tungsten at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Old advice revised

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic by Zach Weinersmith revises some old advice about giving a speech. His version is:

 

“The best advice on how to do your seminar speech is what my professors taught me. Tell them what you’re gonna tell them. Tell Them. Then tell them what you told them. That way nobody will stay awake through your talk and you will never be scooped.”

 

A image of children writing at the blackboard was adapted from a 1938 photo at the Library of Congress.

 

Stephen Colbert explains Donald Trump’s behavior using just a blackboard

You don’t really need videos or an animated PowerPoint to effectively make a point. On The Late Show Stephen Colbert used a Venn diagram drawn on a blackboard.

Watch the following eight-minute YouTube video, titled One Diagram Explains Every Conspiracy Theory Against Donald Trump. (Some may find it offensive. It definitely is Not Suitable For Work). Watch starting at 5:10 to see him draw that diagram.  

How can you easily draw dotted chalk lines on a blackboard?

On Monday I discussed the hour-long video celebrating Professor Walter Lewin’s book For the Love of Physics. During the question and answer period (at 52:30), one of his former students comments:

“So, I sat in on your lectures here, I think about twenty years ago, and I’d forgotten one thing that I learned from you was how to draw dotted lines on chalkboards - which I actually used myself when I was a professor (at Northwestern) for some number of years , so very useful skill.”

Then he asks how did your lectures evolve over time? Professor Lewin replies:

“I think I was always eccentric. It’s true, and so from day one my lectures were always different from the mean. But, of course, they evolved in a way that grew substantially, and that is not because of the dotting of the line - because I could already do that in high school.

....But, it is amazing that many physics professors want to know how I make those dotted lines. There is a two-minute videotape which someone made. Someone looked at all the dotted lines I ever drew in 8.01, and put that in one videotape. It’s a riot!”

Here is that video:



Can you see how he makes those dotted lines? I had to look carefully before I saw what he does differently. When you pull the chalk along behind your hand. you get a normal solid line. Look carefully at 0:50 on that video, as shown in the following still photo:

When you instead push the chalk ahead of your hand you can get a dotted line. In a comment on another video by Walter Lewin someone said:

“I know chalk boards are hard to find nowadays. but it's easy to do: hold the chalk loosely in your hand and hold it at an angle so that it's ahead of your hand. Push it in the direction of your line and it skips making a dotted line. Too easy.”

Is it easy to explain in detail though? No! Look at this University of Bristol web page. (Benjamin Hall did both a web site and report about it). There also is a 28-page paper (Hall's Ref. [10]) on Periodic Motion and Bifurcations Induced by the Painlevé Paradox about all the math involved in this and similar situations.

Added January 4, 2012

Another place this trick would be useful is in laying out chalk art.

Blackboards and Whiteboards

Back before blackboards there were personal-sized slates. Blackboards on walls or portable stands are one of the oldest visual aids. In 1801 George Baron was using them to teach math at West Point. Over in Edinburgh, Scotland James Pillans even was using colored chalk to teach geography.

The more recently developed whiteboards can provide better contrast for colors. A whiteboard is like an infinite supply of flip chart paper. Most tips in a previous post about flip charts also apply to whiteboards. The main improvement is that the whiteboard can be erased and re-used almost endlessly to make simple points either during your presentation or while answering questions.

Here are some tips about using whiteboards:

1. Do you want to be a “Snow Ninja” and hide at the whiteboard? If not, then don’t wear a white shirt or a dress for your presentation.

2. Always have a spare marker in your briefcase, purse, or pocket. Murphy’s Law says that the one on the tray beneath the whiteboard will be dried out and useless.

3. Talk to the audience, and not to the board. Write a brief point, then turn around and stand beside what you have just written.

4. Unless you like wearing clown makeup, don’t wipe your marker-covered hands either on your face or clothes.

5. Don’t be a board magician. Let the audience read what you have written before you make it disappear. If you show off by writing with your right hand and almost immediately erasing with your left, you can go right to the top of your audience’s enemies list.

Recently I saw a blog post on how the lowly whiteboard is the perfect presentation tool. It talks about using a laptop-sized board for discussion with one other person. The same could have been said for a slate with a wood frame – as is shown above in the painting of Friar Luca Pacioli from around 1500.

There also are digital whiteboards, but they are a whole other story.