You may start this lesson as your last lesson of the spring term, or you may start it in the Easter holiday.  Everyone will work on the material in this lesson over Easter, coming back to school ready to give their presentation.

There are three pieces of work to be completed here. They're numbered in brackets below, in red.

Background

Giving good presentations is a skill and you get better with practice. Someone who's often associated with giving good presentations is Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple.  As a presenter, he is also often contrasted with Bill Gates — to Bill Gates' disadvantage.  Have a read of Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic and (1) write briefly on  your blog what lessons you take away from this.

Perhaps the best known presentation software is PowerPoint, but it's also much criticised — at any rate, the use people make of it is often criticised.  Watch Don McMillan's How NOT to Use PowerPoint: what are the problems he lists?  Make a note of these in the same blog post (1).

Pecha Kucha

There's a special kind of presentation known as Pecha Kucha:

The Pecha Kucha method of presentation design and delivery is very simple. You must use 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds, as you tell your story. That's 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Slides advance automatically and when you're done you're done. That's it. Sit down. The objective of these simple but tight restraints is to keep the presentations brief and focused and to give more people a chance to present in a single night. Presentation Zen

Over the holiday, (2) create your own mini Pecha Kucha, 5–10 slides, on a topic that's important to you, using one of the following: PowerPoint; Google Docs; SlideShare. 

• PowerPoint: bring your finished presentation in to school for your first lesson of next term, or mail it to your teacher so he can open it in the lesson.
• Google Docs: log in to your Google account, go to Documents, choose New and then Presentation.  Once you've created your Presentation, share it with your teacher.
• SlideShare is another way of sharing presentations online. You can prepare your presentation offline and then upload it to SlideShare. You can then show it to the class from SlideShare. (SlideShare now has a mobile interface — see SlideShare on your mobile phone | SlideShare Blog — so your classmates with a suitable phone could follow your slides on their phones in class. SlideShare accepts presentations from OpenOffice and also Apple's Keynote — so Mac users can prepare their slides in Keynote and use SlideShare to show them at school.

Research your topic using Wikipedia. As well as showing the slides under timed conditions (20 seconds per slide) you must, after the talk, say how you researched it and how you evaluated the reliability of the Wikipedia material you used (3).

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Bonus item: the image below is of a nineteenth century diagram that's been described as perhaps 'the best statistical graph ever drawn'. When you're next in the Gallery, look at the graph and read about it there. Why is it so admired and how could it help you think about presenting information?

A modern "revision":

More here.