Do's and Dont's when presenting a demonstration of a project

In a few days my team and me will make a 30 minute presentation for our project Studycat. Studycat is basically a Site coded in Ruby on Rails, where students from all over the world can exchange their information like course material etc. While Rails made it extremely easy to quickly create a nice-looking App, another hard part comes now - the presentation.

Don't #1

Don't just sit at the computer and talk almost silently in front of it. Yes, you must concentrate on the presentation itself for sure, but you also need to concentrate about presenting the information, since that what depends on a good presention. While the preparation of the presentation itself is important as well, the most important aspect is presenting itself!

Do #1

It might be hard to switch back between the technical aspects of the project and speaking with emotion to the people. You need to train that! Otherwhise you will have a monotone voice, telling boring facts and noone will be interested in that. Train yourself to speak in variation. Maybe even try to bring up some mimics by watching to the people sometimes, instead of purely watching on your screen

Do #2

If you are already sitting infront of your pc and are sometimes unsure about what to talk about next, make notes!
I cannot emphasise this enough, it's extremely important to make notes since with them you can easily get your mind into the presentation again, when there is a short pause. Also, people won't even see your notes when you are presenting the demonstration, so just do it!

Do #3

Introduce your presentation by some sentence like "Now you just heard an awesome overview of the project and im sure you are all impressed. Now dont look too much at me, but focus on the project!". That way, you actually created some kind of excuse that you won't be that much entertaining. It's a feature, not a bug ;-)