Visual learners love good visual content. You lose visual learners if your visual content is bad.
Auditory learners will get more out of a well spoken and practiced presentation. You lose auditory learners if you stumble, stammer, say uh…umm…uh too much and your vocals don’t match your message.
What about kinesthetic learners? They learn by doing. What is there to DO during a presentation besides look (visual) and listen (auditory)?
That’s right.
You’ll lose them because there’s nothing to do but watch and listen.
Kinesthetics like to do things with their hands and their bodies, not just their eyes and ears.
What’s the answer?
Animated Graphic Organizers.
But isn’t that still just visual content?
Yes – and wait for it.
The trick is to ask the audience to do something with you as you build your graphic organizer.
Let’s say you want to compare two concepts. Building a graphic organizer that is a Venn Diagram is a great way to show that.
Avoid a table that would only appeal to your auditory folks and potentially mortally offend your visual folks.
Ask the audience to use make circles with their fingers and overlap them. As you build your comparison, ask them to mentally tag each section of the graph with what you want in those spaces between their fingers. Build those mental tags into your presentation speaking notes.
This is just one way to use visual information to reach across the divide to your kinesthetic learners. Can you think of others?
See this post for a list of free graphic organizer tools.