#provote

Recall the last time you attended a lecture session where the speaker ran a 60 minute marathon lecture and didn’t care to ask the audience a single question. You will be able to recollect how bored you may have felt, how the person next to you was yawning or another attendee busy texting! The truth is audience attention spans have their limits and irrespective of the stature of the speaker or the subject a speaker needs to take his/her audience along. The speaker has to actively engage with the audience to make the sessions worthwhile. Thankfully technology allows for such active engagement and you can easily make use of an audience response system for this. These systems make your sessions engaging and entertaining. Here is how you can energize your lecture using an audience response tools during your next session.

# Start with an ice breaker The very manner in which you introduce your audience to the lecture or the training content often decides upon its success. Your idea should be to warm up the room the moment you start talking. There is no better way to do this than an icebreaker question or poll. Start with a simple quiz related to your topic and ask the audience to make use of their response system to answer it. This will help you strike the right chord with your audience and also give you an insight into the kind of knowledge that they have. Once you have results to your quiz you can get started with the session. The benefit here is that you will be able to grab attention of the entire house at one go.

# Engage by asking regular question The biggest challenge for any trainer or presenter is to be able to keep his/her audience motivated. If you are dealing with a complex topic or a lesson the chances of your audience loosing track of your lecture is quite high. As we have mentioned in the introduction most listeners tend to loose attention after a while and this is where you need to boost their attention at regular intervals. Throw a question to the audience every now and then and ask them to share their answers and views. Summarize the results and share your own position on those results. This will help in reigniting their attention and give necessary breaks from marathon lecture session.

# Finish by taking feedback A lecture session is as much for the audience to gain new knowledge as it is for you to know how you fared in explaining the subject and helping enrich their knowledge. After you are done with your lecture and presentation you should ask your audience to provide feedback on the content as well as your presentation. This helps you improve your performance as a trainer and also make the content more engaging for your audience.

Welcome to ‪#‎provote‬: EPIC's 'Get Out the Vote' Campaign, brought to you by The Avengers! Today we talked to Dr. Banner about some important issues to consider...

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CONTENTIOUS ISSUES?

With an election around the corner, it’s important to keep track of where different parties stand on different issues. I’m not much of a politician myself (I’ve got the wrong temperament for dealing with politicians) but I’ll do my best to break some of the major issues down for you.

Jim Prentice, the leader of the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party, called this upcoming election after he presented the PC’s Proposed Budget. A provincial budget explains the government’s financial plans for the year that runs from April to March. With a population of over 4.1 million people, Alberta is Canada’s fastest growing province. This puts a lot of pressure on the government to accommodate with new schools, health facilities, and roads where they weren’t needed before. But when oil prices crashed earlier this year, that, combined with increased spending, put Alberta into an approximate 5 billion deficit.

So now Alberta’s stuck in a place where they need to spend more money, but they also need to save more money. And every party has a different idea as to how to go about doing that. It’s almost as much work as rebuilding New York City after an alien invasion. Almost.

Below you’ll find some links to the proposed platforms of each of the six political parties in Alberta, but if you’re interested in the reading my take on some the big issues in your province (Health Care, Education, and Oil) you can click to read more. 

Not a whole lot of people like me when I’m angry. But there’s no denying that when I’m angry, I make a difference. Being angry about the policies that affect you is the first step to changing them. After all, when the Hulk smashes something it stays smashed.

Stay angry, Dr. Banner. 

The Wildrose Platform

The PC Platform

The Liberal Platform

The NDP Platform

The Green Party Platform

The Alberta Party Platform