Your notes

There are plenty of resources available on the web and elsewhere to give students guidance on how to take notes in lectures and other sessions, but what about teachers?

If your material is really technical, there is no way you can deliver it without notes, but finding a method which suits you is largely a matter of trial and error.

However, if the only way you can deliver a lecture is by reading detailed notes, just think what it is like for the students who have to listen to it. Consider putting any detail which they really must get right on a handout or on the VLE.

Crucial both to your delivery and to the students' understanding is communicating the shape of the lecture, and the headings of the topics.

Some suggestions:

• Digesting: if you are really not confident, you may need to write out your lecture beforehand. (Beware! That is all about what you will teach, not what they will learn; what you will deliver, not what they will consume.) Then use the well-established revision technique to reduce it to headings and sub-headings, and then to keywords, and put them on cards. Much of the value of this comes from the process of doing it, so beware that simply picking up the cards for the next year's lecture may leave you bewildered.
• A word processor can help. Write the lecture, then use the standard formatting tools to pick out the key points as headings: go into "outline" view and select only the headings. Arrange them as appropriate and print. But don't make it too easy for yourself—it is the effort which makes it work, not the technique itself.

• Use a presentation package: whether the result is OHTs or a data projection it will make you think in terms of headings and sub-headings.
• Most packages, such as PowerPoint™, offer the option of annotating the slides and printing the result. In recent versions of PowerPoint, there is a "notes" pane by default under the main design pane, and you can print a version including the notes by going through File>Print>Print what>Notes Pages. It's a bit mechanical, but it works.

• Annotate your OHTs: If you are using physical transparencies, you can attach notes to them. You can still buy transparency frames which provide a border on which you can put your notes, but an attached sheet of paper or a "Post-it" note (along the bottom edge) serves as well.

• Using a flip chart?: Make small notes in a corner of each page in light pencil: participants will not see them.

"Trial and error" or preferably of trial, reflection, theorising and experimenting

Really, these techniques are more symptom than substance—if you are prepared to go to this trouble you are either very nervous, or thinking seriously about the audience's learning—or both. It is that act of doing it which probably matters more than the final product.