Looking back ... a crazy few weeks!

So this is the start of a new week ... and it's a week without deadlines!! I had my oral presentation last Thursday and now it's the waiting game until we get our results. I presented via Skype due to my current work contract in Spain. I really enjoyed the experience, despite a power cut in the place I was using for wifi right before the session was meant to start!

For any future students who are yet to carry out their presentation I thought I would talk through the process I carried out to prepare, in case it is of any help. With the final deadline for the critical review and professional artefact, the oral presentation can quickly creep up on you. It's important to consider the ten minute time limit early on to save you more work later on trying to cut lots out. I printed out a fresh copy of my review and highlighted what I though were the key points I definitely had to include. I found this useful in making sure the presentation still followed the correct structure despite selecting specific pieces of information.

Next, I spent time looking at examples of presentations and found TED Talks very interesting. They have lots of examples of varying lengths and it was very informative on choices of style and structure to get all your points across whilst keeping the interest of your audience. A common trend I found was the use of light humour, especially at the beginning of the presentation. I found this had the ability to relax an audience and make then interested in who the speaker was and more responsive throughout. A link to the site is below.

https://www.ted.com/talks

To create my presentation I used power point. I chose to create my slides first before wiring my notes to use to present. I found this made the presentation clearer to me and the notes easier to write as a result. Power point was fairly easy to use, anything I wasn't of how to create was quickly sorted by an internet source.

I planned in time to run my presentation several times beforehand. This was useful for feeling the flow of work as well as checking the time. The first time I ran the presentation I was more than 5 minutes over so some trimming was needed! I ran the presentation for a couple of willing volunteers and it was helpful to receive feedback to make sure the content made sense and that my style kept their interest. I did struggle with being slightly wordy, but there was a lot to cover in a short time!

On the day of the presentation I was looking forward to seeing fellow students hard work and getting time to personally explain my own work. I was the only one in my group who presented via Skype. It did feel slightly strange but I had no major connection problems (once the power cut was solved!) and overall enjoyed the experience.

In my next post I plan to attach a link to my artefact so people can see what my work was all about.