Reynolds book is, to put it simply, outstanding. There are several books that discuss the issues of presenting information in various ways, some of which do an excellent job for example Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points, but Presentation Zen takes the reader to another level when it comes to understanding the nature of presenting one's message.

Reynolds summarises current literature on the topic and gets you thinking about why your key point(s) matter and how we can go about ensuring that the audience, in this case our students, are engaged, want to continue to listen or discuss and that they remember what your message is all about. Presenation Zen encourages the reader to become more creative and, something which we feel is essential, shows us as professionals how we can teach our students to become inspirational and thoughtful communicators.

When we deliver INSET or workshops we always use Garr Reynold's ideas and his theory behind a successful presentation.

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When Studs Terkel passed away in October 2008 thousands mourned, yet most people around the world had never heard his name.  The most interesting thing about Terkel is the way he interviewed people and, perhaps most importantly, who he interviewed. The list of celebrities who are involved in this selection is quiet staggering, however, Terkel’s ‘magic’, in my humble opinion, is when he devoted his time to ordinary individuals whose life journeys revealed a lot about life of that time. This particular selection of interviews include Aaron Copland, Oliver Sacks, Margaret Mead, Daniel Ellsberg, Maya Angelou, Pete Seeger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and dozens of others.  This collection provide excerpts from 48 interviews, first broadcast on Terkel’s daily show on WFMT, which all together, provide a fascinating portrait of the last half of 20th century.

Please visit Studsterkel.org to explore this fascinating individual in more detail and discover other books and listen/watch interviews conducted by Terkel.

Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times by Studs Terkel

This books is a master piece.

In this book Studs Terkel turns to a subject more elusive than those of his earlier oral histories (see Studsterkel.org), namely hope .  There are many very thoughful and though-provoking interviews which keeps you from putting the book down. My favourite interviewis when he talks to Brigader General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay over Hiroshima in 1945, when Tibbets dismisses the possibility for peaceful resolutions to the post-September 11 conflicts. It raises many interesting questions about the nature of warfare and violence.

We both read Made to Sticka while back and became inspired by the Heath brother's idea about why some messages stick where others do not. They explain in an engaging and concrete way how you can construct messages so that they become memorable by following six key principles: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotion, Story. We loveMade to Stickand have used the six principles when designing our courses and deliver the learning. They work. In fact, we became so inspired by the Heath brothers' book that we wrote our own where we explain in great detail how we construct our GCSE and A-Level courses, the way we teach our courses, practical ideas on how to make assessment more engaging and making it matter to students