Looking back, I wish...

Preparation

Preparation wise, I felt the team focused far more on the written proposal than the presentation itself which really did not justify the greater mark allocation to the latter component. Before we knew it, the countdown had begun to D-Day which was in a week. That was as far as negatives went. Having realised we had to shift through the gears and fast, we got down to serious work.

Mental preparation was key. Personally, I was motivated firstly by the Ken Robinson video that was showed during class on October 25th. Watching and subsequently analysing his presentation certainly got me pumped up and inspired. The night before our presentation was also decisive when Alicia messaged us saying that we had done well for the proposal. That certainly eased the pressure and did wonders for my confidence level. It seemed straight forward enough. We had the content. All we had to do was to back it up with our delivery.

In between, the rehearsals helped a great deal as we were able to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s presentation and correct them. For my part, I was advised by my team members to shorten my speech and also to refrain from descriptive language. They wanted me to adopt a simpler and ‘matter of fact’ approach to presenting my part, which would have a greater effect on the audience within such a limited time. It was undoubtedly positive advice and I adjusted my speech accordingly.

Delivery

For this oral presentation, I was solely focused on improving my peer teaching experience. Basis for comparison may have been limited in that peer teaching was much more informal, had a larger scope for humour, a longer time limit and was also aimed at just imparting information related to a subject matter. The proposal in short had to be professional at the same time persuasive enough, a challenge in itself.

From peer teaching, some potential areas for improvement included a tendency to look at the slides too often, being too serious and speaking too fast at times. I took these suggestions on board and made a conscious attempt to correct them. Reviewing the video, I realise that I did not refer back to the slides much which in turn enabled me to connect better with the audience by maintaining more meaningful eye contact (I hope!). I still did speak too fast on occasions, which was due to an intention to finish what I had planned to say. This remains a sore thumb and I guess the only way out is to cut down on content. Expressions wise, though I tried to project a more cheerful image especially when narrating the story of Warren Buffet, I felt that I was a tad too grim looking. (need a little feedback here :))

Audio-Visuals

We went along the idea of Prezi as opposed to the conventional approach of powerpoint slides which were too predictable and not interactive. With Prezi, we could basically add a 3 dimensional mode to our presentations with transitions and also there was more room for capturing the attention of the audience since it was more customised. Its analogous to PC (Powerpoint) vs Mac(Prezi) jk!

2 videos were incorporated into our presentation to better highlight the situation. This definitely worked a treat; in particular Alicia’s masterpiece on several newspaper headlines and our survey results. It was more impactful than us plainly saying that there was a problem which called for rectifying.

We also left no stone unturned with regards to the audio aspect. I was deeply disappointed that the audio system present in class did not work to our favour during my peer teaching session when I tried to replay the interview videos. Determined not to encounter a repeat situation, Alvin came up with a brilliant idea to bring our own speakers to the class. The speakers functioned as expected without any glitches so the team was naturally pleased with that.

However one drawback was the poor video quality of the projector which led to our slides repeatedly changing yellow in colour. This was a distraction even to me whilst I wasn’t presenting. Fortunately though, none of our speakers were put off by that and carried on with their speeches as per normal.

In all, the oral presentation was just another learning curve of ES2007S, from which I’ll take many positives out and continually try to eradicate the flaws.

After all...

"There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave."
-- Dale Carnegie