This whole experience has taught me a lot more than I thought it would. Before the presentation, I was not aware of how much improvement I needed, from designing the slides to having the talk under control. When I began brainstorming for the presentation, I thought that I had known most of what we would cover in the class. On the contrary I was totally wrong. Giving talks is completely different from writing. One needs to rehearse it again and again in order not to get stage fright.
During the presentation I realized that being a good listener is as important as being a good presenter. To be honest I was very nervous at the very beginning of the presentation because I was hoping to give a professional presentation. As a result I was even more stressed out when I saw the negative response from some of my friends from their uninterested look. Sometimes I heard someone chuckling; I panicked as I thought, “Oh! No! Did I do anything silly? Is something going wrong?” My confidence was about to get lost then I saw the friendly smile on our teacher’s face. It was very encouraging and inspiring whenever I looked at Mrs. Richardson. She always shows a lot of interest, enthusiasm and appreciation in any group’s topic. I thought I had to perform better as at least there was one person looking forward to the show. I had a feeling that the ice was broken and I now could go on like the ship sailing on the windy ocean. I appreciate Nigel’s support a lot when he said, “Yes!” in agreement with my questions to the audience as he was the only one who talked. It was one of those cliff hanger moments when if no one said anything, it would be hard to get back on track. It is almost as bad as telling a joke at the start of the presentation but no one laughs.
I have learned so much about myself and how to communicate in a professional fashion. Moreover I find all the strategies we have used during the presentation useful as we might be required to present in our future jobs. I have understood that there is more to effective communication than just listing all the points out and keeping on talking. It also involves understanding the other person’s points of view and feelings.
I have gained so many new skills that will help me in life. I feel that my confidence when speaking to a crowd has improved thanks to this project of giving a presentation. I’m so glad that I have taken this class as it has helped me grow as a person.
Hi Anh. I am sure that both you and I would gain valuable skills which could be applied in our future workplaces.
ReplyDeleteI would like to provide some feedback on your presentation on last Tuesday.
Overall group performance:
Strengths:
1. It was a brave and good attempt to employ Garr Reynold's style of presentation in terms of layout of the slides. Some of the slides do enhance your presentation.
2. There is good control of the time allocated to your group (maximum time limit of 15 minutes).
Weaknesses:
1. I noticed a minor mistake in one of your slides, whereby the total percentages within a bar chart did not add up to 100%. Correct me if I am wrong.
2. Personally, I feel that having blue colour as the background of your slides made them look rather dull. It is also scientifically proven that blue colour tends to make the audience lose focus on one's presentation. A white background with dark0coloured text would be good in almost all occasions.
3. Although I applaud your group for employing the unique style of slide layout, I feel there should be some guide points for sections like background to give the audience a summary of what you are saying.
4. I feel that there should be integration of your survey results into the various sections of your presentation, instead of having a separate section on it. This would show that you have made use of the results to strengthen the main aim of your proposal.
Next I would like to give some comments on your individual presentation.
Strengths:
1. It was a good attempt to move away from the screen, which closes up the gap between you and the audience. This would catch the attention from the audience. I would definitely make an attempt to do so in my future presentations.
2. You had displayed confidence during your presentation by adopting an open posture with a clear and sufficiently loud voice.
Weaknesses:
1. There is a slight mistake on your pronunciation of the word "optimistic". Perhaps preparing your speech beforehand and rehearsing more frequently could easily eliminate such problems in your future presentations.
2. Although the conclusion, which sounded rather familiar to me (from one of the Ministry of Education's advertisements), was unique, I feel that more emphasis should be placed on summarising the key points of your proposal, and reiterating the benefits of it. The ultimate aim of your presentation is to convince your audience to "buy your idea".
Finally, I would like to suggest additional improvements for your presentation.
1. You may wish to ask the student's on their ideal cost of dental care services during your preliminary survey, and make comparisons to the current market rate. If the average cost obtained proved to be lower than the market rate, this could further strengthen your proposal to introduce a subsidised dental service in NUS.
2. The projected increase in the number of students visiting the dentists more than twice a year did not sound convincing to me. I feel that merely adding half the percentage of the population who visit the dentist less than twice a year, and adding it onto the current percentage, is not an accurate projection. I feel that more research could be carried in this srea if possible.
Dear Charlotte,
ReplyDeletefirst of all, I applaud your group for choosing dental care as the topic. This is because though I had been grumbling about the high cost of dental care in NUS, but I had never thought of this idea at the start of the project.
Anyway, it would be even better that you and nwchii can go and try out the current services of dental care in NUS to give a better view and touch of if the price is worth it in NUS with the current service.
In fact for the group project of my group, Masamune and I actually went to the TCM clinic and tried some of the TCM services on ourselves to be able to better report on our proposal. See Hon also came along and witnessed the whole TCM consultation.
As mentioned in the feedback written on Friday, though the story of the star fish is quite meaningful and I am also aware of your group's intentions, I feel that you can pick another story that less people heard of.
With regards to what Meng Wee said, I really did not know that the conclusion is actually used by MOE. That really shows that Charlotte you are very into teaching.
Cheers,
Clover :)
* Hope my kids will be taught by you in the future because you are a passionate teacher. This quality can even be seen in our oral presentation.
Dear Anh,
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I really admire that you know your speech so well that you can present without cue cards. It is another plus point when both you and Wai Chii can present without it and appear so confident at the same time.
I agree with Meng Wee that getting closer to the audience is much better than keeping still at a point. This is an area which I myself find it hard to adopt, as I will be much easier affected by the audiences’ expressions. Especially if someone starts laughing, I will begin to laugh too, and I would not be able to continue my speech at all.
In addition, displaying the statistics is extremely large fonts is a unique way rather than just pasting the pie chart. Furthermore, as mentioned by Nigel in class last Friday, I like the slide with the 21% bar chart moved to the bar chart on the left-hand side of the slide very much.
Hello Anh,
ReplyDeleteLike what Pearlynn had said, I think if you adopted this method of presentation in your teachings in future, you will make an awesome teacher. I was very impressed with your group's presentation because you did not use any scripts or palm cards at all. This is something that I am still trying to maste. Furthermore your group had a lot of information to present as well so it is definitely commendable.
It was good that you came so near to the audience because it shows off your confidence and I apologise if I was not responsive enough. I liked how you varied your tone when you spoke and I think it really captures my attention though like what the others have mentioned, there were certain words which was not pronounced properly but I think it can be curbed with sufficient practice.
I applaud your attempt to use simplified slides because this would mean that bulk of the audience's attention would be on you. This means that your every gesture and expression would be under scrutiny but I have to say that you did not err on that. On the contrary, I think you and Waicii displayed a lot of confidence and it indeed a good example of hard work paid off because your group practiced a lot. However, most audience's have short attention spans so it would be great to at least include the summary of your points in near future so your audience can refer to it if they are lost. This is something I can learn from as well because I feel that my slides were overly-summarised too.
But overall, it is still a job well done and I hope you have benefited from this presentation as well.
Hi Anh, first of all I would like to apologize. I believe I was the culprit you mentioned, the one who chuckled during your presentation. But fear not, I was not laughing at you or anything you said; you did great. However I do concur how in nerve-wrecking situations such as the one you were in, having a good audience is helpful. Like yourself, I was also encouraged when I looked at Mrs Richardson and some of our classmates who nodded and smiled.
ReplyDeleteOn the whole, I think you took a couple of minutes to warm up and get comfortable but after you did, you were confident and spoke very well. You were fluent and had a good pace and I could follow the points you were making. As mentioned in my blog post, I also admire how you made the effort to move closer to the audience; the movements were not distracting at all, instead it made me pay more attention to you.
That said, I do feel that you could be more convincing in your argument. I believe there were times where you made rather sweeping general statements. You also mentioned that having good teeth and a good smile can improve the physical outlook of the students and hence improve the social conditions in NUS, if I'm not wrong. I personally feel that there are other more glaring factors such as the students' current dress code that is rather sloppy, that affect their appearances in a more obvious manner than teeth do. Nevertheless, I applaud your notion to try to get a subsidy for the dental services in our school.
I also really liked your slide background, especially the graphic of the teeth at the corner, which is simply and appropriate. In addition, your incorporation of bar charts was well done and your group used them fairly expertly. Good job!
I'm glad you've learnt alot about yourself in this course, as have I. I hope you achieve your goals with these new skills you have learnt.
Hi Anh Tang,
ReplyDeleteI think your presentation was great overall.
As commented by our other classmates, I also thought that your moving forward to the centre of the class was a good strategy to engaging the audience as well as getting their attention. It was definitely something worth doing. However, I sensed your fear albeit your effort to cover it. Yet again, I thought you did well in trying to adopt a confident self. I am sure though, that it will be of much help if you rehearsed with your family and friends as your audience so as to be confident of adopting this tactic during the real presentation.
Also, I feel that another area that can be worked on is the content of the presentation. I thought more evidences and researches can be done to support your statements, or predictions. For example in the case of your projected increase in people visiting the dentist, you could have find out a percentage increase obtained by other schools or organization when they give a subsidized dental care. From there your group can then gauge the percentage for NUS, by putting into account your survey results and other factors where NUS differs from that organization.
Lastly, I apologise if I had looked indifferent during your presentation while you were trying to get us seem interested. I did not realize I was giving out that information to you. I was actually paying full atttention to your presentation - especially since I had to comment on your group. *smile*
Well Anh Tang, I agree with you that it was very nice of Mrs Richardson to reciprocate you with her smile. I saw you gaining confidence each time you saw her. With that, I would like to give you my last suggestion for improvement, that is, adopt a mindset that regardless of how the audience react, what you will be speaking on will ultimately be of extreme interest to them. Have confidence that what you are proposing is really something commendable and that it will benefit the future users.
Good job, Anh Tang!
I would like to say thank you guys for your comments.
ReplyDeleteWith that being said Meng Wee I will keep the slide background colour in mind next time, although a lot of the feedback I have received has been positive about the colour including Mrs. Richardson. Although I did practice a lot and I did not make a mistake on any words when I practiced, my nerves must have gotten to me there. But I can always practice more. I will remember to keep what you have said in mind. Once again thank you.
Thank you so much Clover. I am grateful that you would want your children to be taught by me. I felt that the starfish story went good with the message I was trying to say, also I did not know that it was such a known story. If I could, I would try the services offered like you did. Unfortunately I just did not have time to do so.
Thank you Joyce so much for the nice things you said.
Dear Charlotte,
ReplyDeletewith regards to the star fish story, it is quite similar to the earlier incident where Joyce and I were practising interviews with you, we were expecting you to know the phrase of "All work but not play makes Jack a dull boy". Perhaps, what are taught in the schools from Vietnam and Singapore are very different. Both of these examples have been repeated many times till they seemed cliches at least to me.
If you have the time, do please share with me what is taught in Vietnam. I do wish to learn some new things from you that cannot be learnt in Singapore's environment and education system.
Indeed through the interaction of people coming from different cultures and countries, we get to expose to more new concepts and things. I have also learnt quite a number of phrases from some of my China scholar friends.
Best regards,
Clover :)
I also forgot to add in the earlier post that my younger brother is going to Kyoto, Japan, for a school exchange programme tonight. I guess it will be really interesting for him to be exposed to drastically different cultural norms even though both countries are Asian by origin.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Japan is very advanced in science and medicine. I am wondering if they have robots to clean your teeth in Japan as they had already invented robots to perform domestic duties. They will certainly help reduce cost and manpower in the long run as everything is automated. It will also address Singapore's issue of an aging population with not enough manpower.
*** I am still wondering if I should send him off the airport later as I still need to continue blogging.
The slides were neat and for most of them, the colour contrast was quite good. However, there were some where the contrast was not obvious like those where it was white on yellow.
ReplyDeleteYou had clear pronunciation throughout the presentation and good eye contact. The handing over portion to Wai Chii was good and your speed was quite well-paced.
However, when you were closer to the screen area, your volume seemed a bit soft. Also I feel that with your walking around the area, it blocks the slides for some of the audience.
I can understand where you're coming from. That expectation and uncertainty when you put a question to the floor. Just glad to be of help.
ReplyDelete