Me, the presenter

OK. This time it was my term to be the presenter and the other students were to be the harsh people criticising me as I usually do them. At first I’ll admit that this was by far not the best presentation I’ve yet given or even could have given. Due to me being lazy and generally speaking having a little time scheduling problem, the given time for layout, content and preparation was about 3hrs. Now I was quite lucky that I could reuse a style I had previously used for my final exam in school before for the visuals and layout. Also rather a lot of work concerning the content had already been done by a student last year (kind of like my predecessor). I simply had to create some slides around some nice looking words, fling in a bunch of pictures and present them in an appealing way. I managed that though the time I had left for an oral preparation was about 20 minutes (exactly the time it took me to get to the university on foot). After all I don’t have problems at all giving presentations and I really like to speak English. In addition to that, the nice layout and the fact that I didn’t use cheat sheets or some kind of notes gave me quite some points.

After all of the presentations we were asked to fill in some “Feedback sheets”. I asked my teacher if I was allowed to have an early look at mine and after permission was granted I read through them all. Well… nearly. I dismissed the positive feedback as it didn’t have anything to learn from. The negative things I’ve “earned” most often were “speaking too quietly” and “confusing”. Well, I admit my presentation being uhm… a bit loose at all, since I had used way too little time preparing it. And regarding the quiet voice that is just something that has to be trained. Not everyone has to give a speech every day and so you can’t realize your flaws or have the practise you need to be a great talker.
I also remember one sheet saying that it took me longer than usual to set everything up. That was based on the fact that I brought my own notebook, because I didn’t want to rely on the university’s old version of OpenOffice.org since I had already seen that OOo’s backwards compatibility was not that great when another student fired up an “.odp” Secondly I wanted to use my notebook’s remote control to move between the slides which proved to be rather comfortable and looked very professional. Nevertheless there’s been more criticism. I’ve stood in front of the presentation, between the projection and the audience. Well, that isn’t too hard considering that the room’s layout was not done with the concept in mind that someone would want to use a remote to show slides instead of sit at the head of the class and just share what’s on his/her screen.

Uff. Gotta go. Already falling asleep in front of the notebook.