If your slide has writting on it, people will read your slide instead of listening to you. Keep the writing to a bare minimum and fill in the missing parts. Even better, use a picture that helps tell your story for that slide.
For each slide, think about what the audience take-away is. They should learn something from what you say for each slide.
Mingle and introduce yourself to a few people before your talk but don't tell them you are a speaker. Before you get on stage see if you can find them in the audience and pretend you are talking to them and not a huge audience. If you can't find some known faces, pick one from the first few rows. Helps with the nerves.
Until you get good at speaking, you need a lot of rehearsal for each talk. Present once in front of a willing friend and then after making corrections, get a few volunteers at work to be an audience. As many rehearsals as possible.
Slow down. Pause. People need a little time to digest each idea. Your material is new to them.
Like everything in life, the only way to become good is to make mistakes. With speaking you do that in front of a lot of people. It helps if you can laugh at yourself and be forgiving. The audience will often treat you the way you treat yourself.
The 'assertion-evidence' approach to creating slides focuses on for keeping text to a minimum and using pictures and other visual aids to support your message. They emphasized it in my engineering school, and I've been using it in workplace presentations for years.
For each slide, think about what the audience take-away is. They should learn something from what you say for each slide.
Mingle and introduce yourself to a few people before your talk but don't tell them you are a speaker. Before you get on stage see if you can find them in the audience and pretend you are talking to them and not a huge audience. If you can't find some known faces, pick one from the first few rows. Helps with the nerves.
Until you get good at speaking, you need a lot of rehearsal for each talk. Present once in front of a willing friend and then after making corrections, get a few volunteers at work to be an audience. As many rehearsals as possible.
Slow down. Pause. People need a little time to digest each idea. Your material is new to them.
Like everything in life, the only way to become good is to make mistakes. With speaking you do that in front of a lot of people. It helps if you can laugh at yourself and be forgiving. The audience will often treat you the way you treat yourself.