Asking business learners to prepare presentations is an excellent form of task based learning. This is a different genre in that it requires the use of short phrases that can work without some of the normal conventions of English.
Presentations are a satisfying product of the research that you might ask learners to do. They will be encouraged to talk about the slides rather than read what is on them.
If you want to put a soundtrack with your PowerPoint presentation you can do this using Slideshare. This is an excellent tool for sharing presentations with other learners and the teacher outside class to refine and perfect the performance before a lesson or even before a genuine presentation that the learner has to give. You can see and listen to an example that Irene did on the subject of concordances. It can be a bit time consuming syncing your audio with the correct slides but it is well worth the effort. If you don’t take the time to do this then the audio will be divided equally between each of the slides. There are lots of useful examples on the Slideshare website.
A less linear type of presentation, which allows you to create your ‘slides’in any order, and then link them interactively, is Prezi. In a multimedia class at Manchester University Irene created this response on the topic of hypermedia and hypertext. As with Slideshare the presentation remains on the Prezi website, where it can be shared.