This particular Touchstone gives you an opportunity to practice your communication, technology, and problem solving skills, which are universal skills that you will continue to refine throughout your career. You will use what you’ve outlined for your argument using the critical thinking process in Touchstone 2 to refine and present what you’ve learned in a well-organized and clearly communicated PowerPoint presentation.
Touchstone 3: PowerPoint Presentation
SCENARIO: You represent your company at a service organization dealing with one of these two issues:
Facing Economic Change
Engaging Civil Rights
Your supervisor asked you to research information related to the history of one of these issues for your organization to help new employees and volunteers understand it better. You will need to create an oral presentation with slides that summarizes your findings and recommendations.
ASSIGNMENT: Back in Unit 2, you chose your issue and your sources and used the critical thinking process to begin to formulate an argument about your topic. Now you will refine your argument and create a PowerPoint presentation that’s due at the end of Unit 3.
PRESENTATION REQUIREMENTS: Your presentation must be 7–11 slides long, not including the title and sources slides. It must include the following slides:
title
outline
topic
evidence (4–8 slides with both text and images)
argument (making connections between past and present)
sources
If you’ve never used PowerPoint before, don’t worry! The assignment template below will help you create slides for a basic PowerPoint presentation. Then you’ll be able to practice using PowerPoint as you put the finishing touches on your presentation. You can also refer back to the Unit 3 lessons that provide support for creating a solid PowerPoint presentation.
Before you get started, let’s look at how you’ll be building the presentation, step by step.
A. Directions
Step 1: Review Touchstone 2
Review the scenario and your work from Touchstone 2. You will need to use your primary and secondary sources, along with the critical thinking process you completed in that touchstone.
Step 2: Create PowerPoint Slides
Use PowerPoint to outline and organize a presentation for new employees and volunteers to help them understand better how key historical events in U.S. History are connected to their work and impact society today.
Slide Component
Title Slide Your title slide will be the first slide and should give the viewer an idea of what your presentation will be about.
Outline Slide An outline slide lets your audience know what to expect from your presentation. This doesn’t need to be the kind of detailed or thorough outline that you might use to plan out a research report. It just needs to include the main idea that each slide will cover—it might even just be the time period covered by that slide.
Topic Slide Your topic is the same as the research question you selected in Unit 2.
Define the historical challenges you are presenting on and expand on the topic of your presentation. What questions will you answer? What historical events and approaches will you explore?
Evidence Slides
(4-8 slides with both text and images) Now that you’ve reviewed your outline, it’s time to add information to your evidence slides. Keep the slides simple! You’ll be able to include more detail when you create your speaker notes.
In these slides, describe the historical challenges, approaches and strategies with supporting evidence. Also, remember to include information from your primary or secondary sources.
Connection Slide Your connections slide should connect past events to current events related to your issue and research question. Think of this slide as showing lessons you’ve learned from your research. What are the takeaways? How should people in your organization apply history to the present and the future?
Try to think of four lessons from the past that you can connect to the present and the future.
Sources Slide Now it’s time to add the primary and secondary sources you selected from Touchstone 2 to a slide, following APA format. (Note: the sources provided to you in Touchstone 2 were already in APA format). Click here for a guideline to help you with APA formatting if you selected any outside sources. Also following APA formatting, your sources should appear in alphabetical order.
Step 3: Add Speaker Notes
You will also need to add speaker notes. Remember, these notes won’t be visible to your audience when you’re in Presenter View. But you’ll be able to see them, and they’ll guide you through your oral presentation.
Step 4: Record Presentation
Now it is time to create a short 3-5 minute oral presentation on your topic using audio voiceover for each slide.
C. Requirements
The following requirements must be met for your submission:
All content must be appropriate for an academic context.
Composition must be original and written for this assignment.
Plagiarism of any kind is strictly prohibited.
Audio presentation is 3 to 5 minutes in length.
Submission must include your name and the date.
