I don’t enjoy sitting for an hour and giving my full attention to someone simply talking. That person has to explain things very clearly and dynamically to avoid distracting me, which is rare.

I know this doesn’t just happen to me. Some studies indicate that attention cannot be maintained for an hour. Fifteen minutes is optimal. Therefore, not everything works when giving a talk.

I am very critical of my work, and if this happens to me with other speakers, I assume that the same thing can occur to other people with me. I am not interested in giving talks or training so dense and complete that only someone who already knows about the topic I am talking about would be able to understand. There are other formats for this, such as publishing on a blog or recording a video. A talk is more interactive since the speaker is in the same room as you.

Therefore, I always try to adapt the content. But adapting doesn’t mean limiting yourself to giving 15-minute talks. There is another alternative: gamification. Kahoot, Mentimeter, a Miro board, real-time surveys… anything that is interactive and helps maintain interest works.

Since I like to experiment, from time to time, I invest time in researching or thinking about some of these activities from scratch. And last week, I found a page full of them.

Flippity is a website full of free resources for generating activity pages. You can create a table with a ranking of scores, a trivia, a quick typing contest with personalized texts, your own wordle… and it allows you to configure everything from a Google spreadsheet: flippity.net

Each resource has a demo to see the final result before implementation and instructions to download the template and generate your page. Additionally, Flippity does not require you to enter any personal information.

So, if you are also interested in adapting your talks and activities to a more interactive format, I recommend that you save this page in your favourites ;)

Original post (in Spanish) on LinkedIn here