Okay its over now. I read Doris's post and I thought that I should also reflect on my first presentation and share with everyone how I felt during the peer teaching session as well as some of the comments given.
Waking up at 7am in the morning today with little sleep the previous night proved to be a bad idea. Symptoms of running nose and teary eyes suggested that I have most likely caught a flu and I was actually contemplating on whether I should turn up for class.
But I can't leave my teammates in the lurch can I? After all, we had spent quite a lot of effort on this teaching session. Anyway, problems surfaced even before the session started and one of it was a classical case of communication breakdown. My group was told to print out the rubrics so that our fellow classmates can evaluate us. However, my group mistook the rubrics to be the lesson plan without clarifying. Thankfully, Miss Lim was really kind to provide us with some of the extra rubrics that she had.
Before I go on to the problems with my team's presentation, I would like to share some of the comments that I had been given.
- Troubles of visual aids disturbed my presentation
- Slide backgrounds inappropriate
- Don't use red words on black background
- Weird handover of presentation
- Show confidence and don't be too nervous
- Uptight
- Monotonous
- Paused too long between sentences
- Reduce the "errs" after each sentence
- Try not to look too much at slides
Problem 1 - As one can see, our slides did not turn out to be as wonderful as we had planned and contributed significantly to the negative comments . The website which held our slides was slow, resulting in a long transition between the slides and the points. My advice to the rest of the groups out there is to use Microsoft Powerpoint.
Problem 2 - Lack of "pre-audience". Although my team and I did practice presenting, we did not have an audience prior to the presentation to comment on us. We could have avoided situations like " red words on black background" and "inappropriate backgrounds" if we had our friends to take a look at our presentation. "Weird handover of presentation" happened because I had too many slides on my part and Doris had to help me out with some slide from somewhere. Maybe I should have insisted on finishing the whole section? ( Do comment on this)
Problem 3 *Major* - Me.
I felt that I did not do a good introduction and dragged the rest of the team down. I wanted to try doing a presentation without cue cards and I think it was a disaster. Observations 6 - 10 was probably due to me not being able to remember my lines. Lesson learnt: Don't try anything new unless you have experience. Use cue cards and review comments 1- 10 again before the next presentation.
Looking on the brighter side of things, I do have some positive comments that I am proud of.
- Effective class activity ( I was worried that the activity might be too simple and boring)
- Helps out group member
- Useful handout (A lot of time and effort were actually spent on crafting the guides and tips)
Lastly, I would like to thank the class for the comments and support they had given. Every comment is an opportunity for me to improve and become better. I look forward to see everyone in class again!
1 comments:
Hahaha, Terence, one thing I really like about your posts is the very apt use of cartoons to highlight your points. Not only does the use of cartoons grab your readers' attention, it also helps to enhance your readers' interest. But of course, the graphics used are only as valuable as their supporting text.
Thanks for the review, Terence (though you don't really have to separately blog about it - we will have a review during the individual feedback session).
Let's talk more during the feedback session.
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