2019/2020 LE blogs

Today it was our turn to make a presentation about the school environment. This is my own reflections on my presentation although of course, others might have a different opinion. I thought that the good points were the timing, movements and interaction. Firstly, I was a little nervous and I was worried that we would finish too quickly.  However, my part was about three minutes and ten seconds: it was within the time limit for each person. Secondly, I thought my gestures were good. I had my arms moving and pointed to the actual chairs and desks during the presentation. To be honest, I'm not sure why but these gestures came out unconsciously. Thirdly, I tried to interact with the audience. I threw a question at them and moved a chair to wake them up. On the other hand, the bad points were lack of eye contact, lack of emotion on my part and pauses. Firstly, I noticed that I have a tendency to look mostly at the audience who are sitting at the front.  Also, I looked at the la...

Today, I watched other teams present their project about the school environment. I was relieved that our team didn't have to do a presentation today so we had an extra day to practise and reflect on how to improve our own presentation.  After watching the other groups, I thought some points we should work on is eye contact, movement and filler words. There are too many things to be conscious about during a presentation but I tend to forget these points when I'm concentrating on my topic. To prevent this, I will practise more before my presentation. There were some unique ideas from the other teams. Personally, I think team 3's idea of putting plants in the classroom was very good. They've researched which plant was suitable for the classroom and it was an easily achievable change that could be made quickly. Despite this, I was shocked that the given grades were very low. I fully felt that the way you make the presentation is really important.

At the beginning of the class, Mr.Paterson told us that the audience pays attention to our body language more than what we are saying. Specifically, 92% of the communication will be done in body language. I had originally thought that presentations are about what we say, but in fact, it was about how we say it. After that, we began our last preparation for our presentation. We finished our slideshow (just needs to be fixed a little bit) and checked the flow of the presentation. Our group didn't have the time to create extra features (for example group logo) to make the slideshow better. We need to work on the delivery part of our presentation and to do that, I want to make keywords of what we are going to say. Then, we can remember and organize our points easily.  We will practice and memorize our parts well so that we can talk one after another seamlessly. 

Today we worked in groups to prepare for the presentation. At the beginning of the class, Mr.Paterson said that the presentation was tomorrow. I panicked because I only had one day to prepare and practice for it, but I still haven't finished yet. I was relieved for a time when the presentation was postponed to next Monday, but I soon realised that unfortunately, there are other assignments and projects to do this week and I have less time to work on this project. Now I regret not making a schedule beforehand because when we rush to complete our projects, usually the quality of the project would not be good, especially presentations. My other members have finished their part of the slideshow so tomorrow we want to go through all the slides and check what we are going to say. I can imagine what would happen if we do not practise our presentation. Our non-verbal communication skills would be poor, have no uniformity as a team and our presentation will be boring for the audience. The...

Today I uploaded and used the images that I took yesterday. There were a few things that I realised using the images. Firstly, there were not enough images to use in the slideshow. I should have taken more pictures to use because more information connects to better content. Secondly, the images didn't look good and effective for the slideshow. I think the reason is that the wall in the background had greyish depressing colours (that's a problem too) and the desks in the classroom were very messy. Also, I was searching for better chairs & desks for the classroom, and I found good products from companies called Steelcase and HermanMiller. I want to use the images on the website so I can show what kind of chairs & desks we should use, but I couldn't find the images of these products in the creative commons website. This can be a big disadvantage because if I couldn't use the images, I will have to describe it in words or not even mention it. I felt pressed whe...

Today we learned about creative commons. This organization releases licenses that can allow you to use other people's articles, images etc if you fulfil the conditions. I find this very helpful since I always had to check the references carefully each time I use an image. There are four symbols that show the creative commons licenses' level (attribution, share-alike, non-commercial, no derivative works). Mentioning these licenses in presentations can make it more reliable. The only problem is that the creative commons logo looks like the copyright logo (there is an extra "c"). Also, we learned about Bitly. This website service lets us shorten a long URL. For a test, I made a shortened URL using Bitly. This is the URL when I searched "bitly" on Google Chrome. The actual URL for this was { https://www.google.com/search?ei=tz_-XO2RCtzKmAWfuIiQDg&q=bitly&oq=bitly&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i67j0l3j0i10j0l5.6074.6919..7231...0.0..0.118.520.2j3......0....1..gws...

Today, I learned that getting the audiences’ attention actually means inducing a dopamine reaction inside the audience. I didn't know this could be scientifically proved. I did some research, and I found out that dopamine determines our concentration, mood etc,  but we need stimulation to produce them. I was surprised that Mr.Paterson used 134 slides for the model presentation, but I didn't notice that at the time because I was so concentrated on the presentation. This means that a lot of dopamine was produced and that we need enormous amounts of stimulation to produce dopamine in the audience too. I'm worried if I could create such stimulation. I also learned how to use Google forms. It was actually very easy to make a survey. Meanwhile, I thought that Google's services cover all the office365 services. For example, Google slides work like PowerPoint and Gmail works like Outlook. I suggest our school should use Google instead because it's free to use the services....

Today we looked at Mr.Paterson's model presentation. The content of the presentation went into my brain very smoothly. I think this was because of the many pictures and videos in his presentation. About 90% of the slides were pictures/videos and I saw about twenty of them. I was able to capture the flow of the construction of the house. Also, the font, background and animation were all the same throughout the presentation. Some people use different backgrounds and animation that take up too much time in their powerpoint presentations. Especially the animation that insert words in the screen is distracting. Besides, the way Mr.Paterson talks is very easy to understand. I didn't need to concentrate too hard to try to understand what he was saying, which meant that I could keep my attention on the slides. Now that my group has decided on a major topic, we decided three sub-topics too. We will work individually and research on our own. I think the hard part would be the research p...