Turning A New Page And Burning The Old

Today in class was a bit of a shocker, I sat down and looked up at the board to see the lecture title, and it was a lecture on presentation. Following the theme of the previous weeks I immediately assumed it would be how we present our work. I soon found out that in actual fact we would be learning how to give a successful speech and present our work to an audience.

This seemed to me to be slightly irrelevant at this point in the course as it seemed the purpose was to prepare us for the final part of the course where we will have to present our digital portfolio; however, this isn’t at all how I felt by the end of the day.

After the lecture ended we were then told we were going to be making a presentation today, total shocker, I was not prepared for that one. My thoughts were mainly that I was not ready to stand in front of the whole class and deliver a speech. After the task was elaborated on, we were told we would be given a colour to research and work in pairs to prepare for the task, this was a relief to have some support, I don’t think I could have volunteered to work by myself like Craig did.

I think this was due to the fact that I did not know what was expected, but having now gone through this process I am more confident in my own ability. I hope that in the future with more practice I will not be afraid to do the same.

I was given the colour orange and Ben as a partner, I thought what a better way to highlight we had worn the same outfit today. Clothing issues aside, I was happy to work with Ben as I know he works hard and that we get on.

Working with Ben was very productive; our combined insecurity that we weren’t doing enough work seemed to propel us to produce far too much content. This wasn’t something we realised until it came to rehearsing our presentation. We had to get through the presentation in two – three minutes, my first attempt lasted about 5 minutes and I hadn’t covered all the information we gathered, I thought crikey what a fine mess Ben’s research, and my fancy pants PowerPoint jiggery pokery, has gotten us into.

After much practice and what felt like a history lesson, we had the speech down to a respectable two minutes thirty seconds. This was very relieving; I had felt at a bit of a loss when we first discovered that we’d gone too in depth.

In the future I will now consider the length of the presentation much more, producing ten slides for a three minute presentation is more the double what is required.

I did enjoy making the presentation and using PowerPoint, a programme I have not used before, I do feel I got to grips with the basics of it quite quickly though.

Overall the presentation was a success, and I feel it was a really useful thing to do. I did not expect to have gotten so nervous stood up in front of two people though; as I am know for being quite an attention seeker. This is definitely something I can learn to improve, just by taking deeper breaths during the presentation. The positives were that the content we produced seemed to go down a storm and that nothing was mentioned about my body language, so I’d just like to thank my Mom and Dad and everyone at Interactive Media for being so supportive. I do feel that I could have used the time more effectively working on my project today, so I will now have to take a look at my time plan and move a few things around.

On a different note, it would seem that it is time to turn over a new leaf, after receiving an email about the content of the blogs last week I did feel that some of the points raised could be applicable to my own blog.

After a discussion about the blogs with my feedback group it was touched upon that there is room for improvement. To be honest I was slightly surprised at the time, but looking back at my entries, I can see that I tend not to dwell on one subject for very long with little evaluation. However I am always willing to step up and take criticism on the chin so feel free let me know if this ones up to scratch if you manage to wade through it.

I now intend to use the evaluation system that was given to us in our first project to try and improve my blog. I shall try to delve deep into my psyche, which is about an inch deep and a mile wide, and I hope that I can then produce something of the standard that is expected or even improve on it. If I can do this, then hopefully, it will carry through everything that I do and this can only lead to success.