From pretty good to powerful & engaging (a BOSS Case Study)
I strongly recommend Echo Rivera's online presentation course, “Blast Off to Stellar Slides.” I took the Blast Off to Stellar Slides (BOSS) course offered by Echo Rivera in August 2019. I took part in the course because I recently published my book, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter and How They Changed America,” and was asked to serve as a keynote presenter to talk about my book before an audience of 100-150 people.
While I thought I developed pretty good presentations before taking BOSS, I learned so much by taking this course. Echo’s course taught me 1) how to tell a focused and engaging narrative with a few key points, 2) consider the impact goal of the presentation, 3) how to best present quotes, 4) use better pictures and texts, and 5) the usage of slides.
Slides before BOSS
Echo was super helpful with the one-on-one calls (Echo’s note: these calls are only available to members of my online course), providing me with great insight on how to create engaging presentations.
Echo is down to earth, practical, understanding, and has a sense of humor. She was always responsive to my questions and offered me numerous tips as I developed my presentation.
At times, I felt overwhelmed by all the work I had to do. It is a bit time-consuming to do at the beginning (and I only had one month to work on this with Echo’s help before giving my keynote presentation); however, I knew the time invested would be well worth it, especially since the presentation I was prepping for was high stakes.
I’ve been asked to give a book presentation at numerous academic institutions and thanks to Echo’s course, numerous academics, students, staff, and the general public have informed me what a powerful and engaging presentation I’ve given. People remained engaged, even after speaking for nearly an hour about my book.
Slides After BOSS
It was great learning about how to present effective and engaging slides. No one teaches you how to do this but academic PowerPoint presentations are used all the time – to teach, at conferences, seminars, etc. Unfortunately, so many commit death by PowerPoint. Echo has taught me how to communicate my work in an effective and engaging manner to a wide array of people. Taking BOSS was most certainly worth the time and money!
Dr. Jennifer Cobbina is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. She received her PhD in criminal justice at the University of Missouri – St. Louis in 2009. Dr. Cobbina’s areas of expertise center on police-community relations, youth violence, and concentrated neighborhood disadvantage, with a special focus on the experiences of minority youth and the impact of race, class, and gender on criminal justice practices. Her research also focuses on corrections, prisoner reentry and the understanding of recidivism and desistance from crime. Her mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative research predicts recidivism and desistance outcomes and also explores offenders’ perceptions regarding how they manage reentry and integration back into the community. Her scholarship is centered on improving the reentry outcomes of individuals with a felony record and/or has been formerly incarcerated. Her goal is to produce research that is theoretically informed, empirically rich, and informs criminal justice policy and crime control practices. Dr. Cobbina’s research has been published in a number of academic journals, including Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice & Behavior, British Journal of Criminology, and Journal of Crime and Justice.
