Friday, March 26, 2010

Reflection on Oral Presentation 2


On 25th April 2010, my group and I presented our problem-solving project. Though Miss Brenda complimented our group, I felt that there were several aspects that could be improved on, both individually and as a group.

Individual Reflection

I felt that my performance was below my own expectations, with the first crucial mistake being complacency. My group’s turn to present was pushed back from Monday to Thursday, and being overly-confident, i did not go through the slides again on Wednesday to refresh my memory. Though i could remember most of the content, there were times when i stumbled over my words because i had to reaffirm the content on the slides. This may seem minor and unimportant, but faults like these can be easily rectified. Henceforth, no matter how prepared i might be, i would definitely take the extra effort and run through the slides again. Better safe than sorry.

After the Q&A session, i reflected on how i performed on answering the questions with regards to our project. Initially, i was rather pleased with myself, being able to address most of the questions posed. However upon deeper thought, i realized that i was speaking for majority of the time during the Q&A, denying my teammates the chance to express their thoughts. Thus, this made me recognize the fact that there is no ‘I’ in the team, and the team can only truly shine when everyone shines together.

On the bright side, i felt that there were several plus points of my presentation, with the most noteworthy, being my ability to focus the audience’s attention. By appearing confident and being vocal, i felt that i was able to channel ‘energy’ into my presentation, and hence capturing my audience’s attention. This is definitely a strength that i would continue to exploit to aid me in future endeavors.

Team Reflection

As a team, i felt that though we had several shortcomings, we fared relatively well overall.

In my opinion, the first and foremost issue with our presentation, are our slides. To begin, our slides were too lengthy, with several slides having excessive words. Also, perhaps due to the fact that our slides were done individually before collating, the presentation did not flow well, with some slides being structured differently. Last but certainly not least, would be the several spelling mistakes which made the presentation seem really unprofessional. All these mistakes cannot be attributed to any single group member as everyone is equally responsible in standardizing the slides and rechecking them for errors. As such, i felt that we could have done much better if there was better communication to decide on the format of the slides.

On the other hand, it was apparent that every group member did their utmost to contribute as constructively to the team as they possibly can. Due to a lack of communication, we may not have performed as well as we desired. But in terms of teamwork, i felt that everyone tried their best to accomplish their individual parts for the better of the team, and to bring the team one step closer to the final objective.


I would like to end off with a quote:”Coming together, sharing together, working together, succeeding together.” We might not know if our presentation is a success, but by being able to work as a team, we have already succeeded.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Andy,

    You were very energetic and your enthusiasm gave our team the morale we needed.Your performance is not as bad as you think it is.Although i agree with the fact that you did were too active in the Q and A session but it does not mean that you are not good.We all learn from our mistakes.Maybe for the next presentation you might want to consider asking the opinions of your team mates first.I also agree that our flow during the presentation was not that well during the presentation as we were all a bit nervous during our presentation but overall we still gave our best and it was a good presentation.It is a pleasure working together with you in a team.

    Regards,
    Joon Wai.

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  2. Hi Andy,

    I think that you are right about our presentation, it is lengthy and does not flow well. If we practice on our own before our presentation, we can spot and solve all these shortcomings. I also think that we should discuss on how the whole presentation is going be like, instead of going straight to dividing the task of doing the presentation slide. But overall, we still manage to finish our presentation successfully but with average results.

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  3. Dear Andy,

    I think that you did a pretty good job during your presentation as you were able to capture the audience’s attention with your energetic and interesting speech.

    I also think that the layout of the slides were pretty good, but the order of the presentation was not really up to par. Your team was rapidly switching between existing solutions and your new proposed solutions. This made it very difficult to follow the ideas. Maybe it would be a better idea to group all the existing solutions together, and then talk about the new solutions.

    Also, because your team had so many proposed solutions, it would be a good idea to include a slide to summarize them.

    To conclude, I think that your individual presentation went pretty well, and the only problem that I saw as a member of the audience is the ordering of the slides.

    Regards,
    Russell

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  4. Hey Andy,

    You did a very impressive presentation, being very confident and doing a great introduction for our group. Despite you saying you did not revise your slides, it was not apparent and there were hardly any signs of you being unprepared. Perhaps you should not beat yourself up over being too active for Q&A, but encourage your group mates to answer or redirect the questions to help them learn to speak up.

    I guess we did not fully utilise our diversity as a team, but it was a good learning experience for us to practice division of labour and also specialisation. Since I could not compile the slides properly due to un-upgraded software :/

    It was still indeed great working with you and keep up the good work :)

    -Anni

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