Reflection on oral presentation

As the applause died away, I heaved a sigh of relief. My journey through this module is nearing its end and I have managed to cross this final hurdle, albeit with some hiccups along the way. Looking back at what our group has managed to accomplish so far, it seems frightening that one month’s worth of labour on the proposal will be reflected in a short 20 minutes oral presentation. We wanted our presentation to be impactful and yet simple, so that the audience will not have a hard time understanding what we are trying to achieve. For my part, I felt that I managed to accomplish some of what I set out to do, but there are certainly things that I wished could have been improved.

The Powerpoint Slides
I made my slides as interesting as possible by using pictures to grab attention. Most of my slides do not have words as I do not want the audience to be divided between reading what is on the screen and listening to what I have to say. In fact, my group members all followed this style in order to maintain uniformity. Furthermore, the effective use of proper imagery has subliminal effects on the audiences’ sub consciousness, helping me to bring my ideas across more effectively.

I made use of the different animations to bring more zest to the presentation while bearing in mind the fact that too many animations would tend to become overbearing. I am quite satisfied with my work on my slides. However, I do feel that my pie chart could have been improved by making use of a more professional looking pie chart. In fact, that was a recurrent problem among our slides. How could we make it as fun and interesting as possible yet maintaining a professional feel to it? That was a fine line that we had to tread and I think we tried our best to do that.

The Presentation
The actual presentation proved to be disastrous due to the technical errors which I failed to anticipate. Some of the videos could not be played because the format was not supported on the computer. I was unsettled by that and I started speaking too fast which is one of my greatest weakness. During the practice runs, I have been trying to slow down my talking speed but I fell into the same trap again. I managed to calm down only at the later part of the presentation and started speaking more slowly. My only saving grace was that I was able to give a generally fluent presentation. During the practice runs, I did not memorize my lines by heart but rather, concentrated more on presenting my ideas in an impromptu fashion. This paid off as it helped me to carry on speaking instead of being stuck when I forgot my script, which actually occurred a couple of times during the presentation. I also maintained good eye contact with the audience throughout but I did not notice if I was smiling. That would be one of my greatest weakness too, because I'm a rather dour person who can't maintain a fake smile to save my life. That is very disadvantageous for me because smiling is important in connecting with the audience.

One plus point for me is that I was quite familiar with my slides and was able to synchronize the transition of the slides with my speech without looking at the screen. Overall, I felt that our team had good time management as we all stuck to our maximum of 6 minutes of “air time” as rehearsed during our practice runs. However, I think that we could have done a better job during the question and answer segment by linking our answers with the research we had prepared for this segment. Furthermore, by hiding behind the desk seemed to suggest a certain degree of reluctance in engaging the audience which we certainly did not want. I realised that and moved out in order to interact more with the audience.

Overall, I feel that this has certainly been an important learning experience as it has given me greater confidence to present my ideas in front of a large audience. It has benefitted me a lot in terms of my development as a future teacher. I would like to thank my group members Kesleen and Zhi Peng who have been most cooperative and patient with my criticisms. The class has been a most wonderful and encouraging audience too. Lastly, kudos to Brad whose comments have played an instrumental role in shaping and refining our ideas.