Reflecting On Our Presentations

     Group presentation play a vital role when it comes to academic and professional life, letting people collaborate, share knowledge and talk to each other effectively. Recently my group and I presented our project and it was about Intercultural Communication, where we explored key aspects. In this blog, I will talk about my experience and discuss the challenges of our group work.

    For Planning and Preparation when we went to our first break out rooms we made our WhatsApp group and we all joined, we did not talk much and we did not know who was working on what sub chapter. We were disorganized when it came to picking on what sub chapter as some of my group members, including me, picked sub chapters that were not in order. For example the sub chapters I chose were 3-3f, 3-3h and 3-3e. It was not in order and we did not know who was presenting first and who was presenting last. Couple of days later no some progress have been made on the presentation but still all over the place. A class before we presented in a break out room we started talking about how we will present and how are going to present in order we switched some sub chapters around to some other group members and we were finally in order and started working on our project.

    On the day of our presentation our group was well prepared and confident. My group's project manager did a really good job doing the introduction and was understanding and everybody else did a wonderful job with their slides and doing their part. Our presentation ran smoothly, we were confident and everyone was very knowledgeable about their part of the presentation and 2 members of my group included videos to keep the audience engaged. However a problem our group had was how much writing there was on the slides. Also there were some weird awkward moments because of the videos either lagging or just the audio from the video was not being received to who ever was sharing their screen at the time.

    Group 2's presentation did a awesome with their presentation. Seeing all the slides and listen to how they spoke, looks like they were definitely confident about their presentation but similar to our group there were too much writing on the slides which usually disengages the audience from the presentation.

    Although I do no remember Group 3's presentation I know they did an amazing presentation. Seeing how everything flowed nicely, unlike our group there was no awkward pauses. Even though I do not remember that much of the presentation I do remember seeing a wall of text on some of the slides. This seems to be a common problem through out all of the groups and needs to be worked and improved on.

     The challenges we faced were lack of communication and disorganization but one challenge I faced was speaking. I was nervous about speaking but when my professor told the class about having extra screens and using a note pad when she is speaking gave me the idea of doing the same. This method gave me more confidence about presenting my part as I wrote all my notes on note pad and put it in the middle of my screen. I still misspoke and stuttered a few times but I will get the hang of it sooner or later.

This group presentation taught me lessons about teamwork, responsibility, and adaptability. I realized how important it is to give clear communication and active participation in group projects . Additionally, I gained confidence in public speaking, learning how to manage my nerves. In the future I will focus and improve my time management more effectively and communicate more often with my group for future group projects. 

    Moving on to the problems. One problem all 3 groups had too much writing in it and or reading it off of the slides during the presentation. When someone reads it off of the slide it really disengages the audience as too much writing on a slide can really overwhelm the audience and more likely than not, wont understand the message due to being overwhelmed.

Another problem was that the videos used on our project was I think too long. It was nice to have videos but it really made our presentation longer than it should have and could sometimes take away the point of the message from the presentation to the audience.

    One thing I noticed was how creative my groups slides were. They were filled with many colors, pictures and many different fonts and made definitely made use of the tool bar above. They were pleasing to look at and looked clean and organized. I will be looking forward to using the toolbar and 

    There is still room to improve. A way to improve our quality on the slides are to use much less text to not divert their attention to somewhere else. Also to make more use of video, bullet points, graphs, charts and mostly pictures that way the audience is not overwhelmed by a wall of text and like the saying goes "One picture is worth a thousand words.".

Next time when I am presenting I will be more confident and try not to speak too fast or too slow because I felt like I was talking too fast on my part, so that way I can stutter less. Definitely will be communicating more with our group so that way we can be prepared and plan better. That way we can execute and deliver the future presentation better than the previous presentations

Reflecting on our group presentations, I think we all did an amazing job doing our presentations. Everybody seemed confident  There are some areas we all can improve on, like using more images and graphs rather than just a wall of text and reading off of the slides. I will definitely contribute and put in more effort for the future projects we get.