Toolkit – Teaching

Teaching material and presenting it

It is important that what you teach is good and sound. There may be a temptation, perhaps by less experienced teachers, to simply copy and paste from elsewhere, assuming it is reliable, especially if the same or similar is in several places. The problem with that is that others have done the same, sometimes changing words to make it look original, but in doing so may change the meaning slightly, or miss out something important. If possible, try to teach from your own knowledge and experience. There are a lot of teachers who teach what others know and they are easily spotted by reasonably experienced beekeepers.

Of course, there will be topics the teacher has little or no experience of. To help with that, throughout this toolkit, we have suggested suitable material that has been assessed by experienced beekeepers as suitable for the UK and Ireland. This short article is to offer a little advice about material to enhance your presentations and guidance on delivering them to small groups.

There is a well-known saying “death by PowerPoint” that keeps being trotted out, mainly from people with nothing positive to say about anything. I agree that PowerPoint can be dull, excessively long and send everyone, including the presenter to sleep, but I think it’s a very useful tool that can be used in several ways for indoor meetings, with many features that if used well can be a great asset in teaching beekeeping. We all have different views of a presentation and its effectiveness and what the audience needs. I tend to use PowerPoint a lot for my presentations, where I give practical beekeeping information. I have short bullet points that prompt discussion with plenty of photographs. I dislike a lot of text the presenter reads out and I sympathise with some, especially scientist, who need to use a lot of graphs to give data.

Some of my presentations are mainly photographs, with arrows or circles to point out various things on the screen. It’s often surprising how something like a photo of a frame of bees or brood can provide several things to talk about.

Be careful if you lift items such as images and diagrams from the internet. They may be subject to copyright or royalties that aren’t obvious. All sorts of things happen, such as images with the copyright owner being cropped off can be displayed on a website.

Royalties can be very expensive if material is used without payment. Items such as photographs are placed with agencies who sell them to users. If they are subsequently copied, they may be subject to further payment. I am aware of a demand for £6000, because a picture was copied and placed on a BKA website three years earlier. The agency was very aggressive and only backed down if it was removed within 4 hours. To avoid any expensive trouble, make sure your material is from a known source, such as your own members or copyright/royalty free. There is plenty available, but make a note where it came from and credit the source.

AI is becoming a major part of modern life where it is very easy to generate articles and presentations, but remember that it will only use material that is already on the internet, that may not be appropriate for your situation. If you source material you don’t have much knowledge of, you may be “advising” beekeepers incorrectly and you may be asked questions you may not have answers for.

Roger Patterson.