picture courtesy of www.asanet.org/employment/careers.cfm
Positives:
From my previous Oral Presentation there was a significant improvement in terms of confidence, and visual aids were being used at a larger scale. For this presentation I felt the need of an aid to illustrate my diagrams in my slides better, and I think my investment of a laser pointer paid off as the outcome was an effective transmission of my idea across to the audience.
Also, compared to the OP1 I repeatedly rehearsed on myself before the actual presentation; hence I was able to make use of my visual aids more, rather than explaining through a speech. By interacting with the screen the speaker can express his ideas better and more clearly to the audience.
Room for Improvements:
For this presentation I had adopted a style that was quite foreign to me: holding a cue card. First of all, it was not a deliberate act as the assignment topic was very data-intensive; initially I felt there was a need for a hand-held aid to remind me of my flow of slides throughout the presentation. I have to admit the move backfired as I made a mistake by planning literally my whole speech, in point form, into the cue card, which was something I did not do before. This resulted in an over-dependence on my cue card, hence causing a situation which happened too many times during my presentation:
I was aware of my problem during the presentation and I made an effort to increase my eye contact with the audience. For future presentations, I would try to adapt the slides to my comfortable style of presenting such as to create a smooth expression of my assignment topic to the audience.
Team Performance
As a team, our slide transitions were generally smooth and we successfully reduced the amount of prompting done during the presentation. This is because of the slide notes that we inserted in a separate laptop during the presentation which helped us to cue on the transition of the slides.
A major flaw in our team is that we were too ambitious in the amount of information we want to express to our audience. Though necessary, it resulted in information overloading, which confused our audience during certain parts of the presentation. Perhaps we should have summarise our contents further and alter our overall presentation to give a concise impression. In addition, because of this problem we overshot our allocated time by more than 50%. This will be an area of concern for the next presentation.
