Flip charts are highly relevant and effective visual aids that can be used to enhance essentially any type of oral presentation or meeting. If used properly and to their full advantage, flip charts can make these presentations more visually appealing, effective, relevant, interesting, and memorable, and will in effect help participants and listeners to absorb more of the presentation and retain the information later.

Flip charts are likely most commonly used in the business world and office workplace with respect to presentations, training sessions, and business meetings. However, the use of flip charts is certainly not restricted to these environments, despite what you may have thought, understood, or assumed. Flip charts can be used in all kinds of environments and in different situations for different purposes. Just think of any instance where there is a leader, speaker, or presenter giving any type of oral presentation (be it a speech, a lecture, a meeting, a lesson, a training session, a debate, a discussion, a brainstorming session) with a group of listeners or participants. In any of these instances, a flip chart could be used as a great visual aid.

For one example outside the traditional business/office environment, teachers—be they homeschool teachers, kindergarten teachers, elementary school teachers, junior high teachers, high school teachers, college instructors, or university professors—can and do make great use of flip charts for their lessons, either in addition to or as an alternative to the chalkboard. One of the benefits for teachers in using flip charts instead of the chalkboard is the permanency factor—what’s on the chalkboard can (and does) get erased, whereas charts, graphs, maps, posters, and diagrams created on a flip chart are permanent and can be put up around the classroom for students to remember.

Students themselves can also use flip charts at school. Younger students can practice their writing, spelling, drawing, and even painting skills, and older students can learn flip chart skills and techniques and practice them, and use them for their own presentations in front of small groups or the entire class.

As you can see, the when and where of using flip charts really has no bounds.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.