Week 9 and 10

Prior to the main activity, we were told to execute the personal warm ups again. This time, it was clear that I needed to warm up my voice – and so ran through the sequence of breathing, humming, and warming up the articulators. I did manage to spread out the time evenly with regard to each exercise, but perhaps next time in other circumstances I should focus more on what my voice needed more – especially if I do not have the luxury of time.

For this week my group is tasked with presenting the question: What is more important and why: the visual or spoken aspects of a presentation? Share your top tips on how to improve one’s presentation skills. Our group focused on the usage of visual aids for this one – mainly how to use visual aids to enhance and not hinder our presentation. Generally, presentation wise, our group received good feedback – but sometimes we did not practice what we preach. For myself, because I wasn’t feeling tip top that week – tended to overcompensate the low energy level with more waffling – which was counterproductive (and rather ironic) as my part stressed on being concise and clear. HuiXiang also commented that I tend to have too many fillers – which is something I am trying to correct as well – I have to learn to be comfortable with inputting pauses in my speech and stop using fillers to punctuate it. Pauses can buy time for one to organize thoughts.  

I thought the group presentations were a good practice on negotiating group dynamics – and how order matters in a group presentation. Regardless of energy levels, loudness, styles – it is necessary to level out and balance each individual’s strong points. To me, it was not necessarily vital to “converge” to a particular speaking style, but it’s how we bridge and transfer this energy level from one speaker to another. This takes practice, as well as a high amount of trust amongst team members.

After which, we reviewed some of the video/webinars done by the class – the main points I’ve jotted down to take note of were the camera angles, environmental noise and clutter and varying of facial expressions. Camera angles needed to be adjust so that lighting on the face is appropriate – not harsh as well as not under lit. We should also pay attention to the environment we are recording our webinars in to ensure there are no distractions either in sound or in visuals (etc. other points of focus in the moving images), facial expression also had to mirror what was being said to show sincerity and engagement. For my own video, I remembered that I might have filmed it too close to the camera (this was confirmed by the Claire who complained about my nostrils and face being too close to the screen in the following week….)

 For Week 10, two other groups presented on how to deliver a good Webinar and the presentation of Steve Jobs. Similarly, we commented on the order of speakers, the quality of voice – but this time also talked about how the speakers utilized space in their presentations. I thought the last group that presented (Steve Jobs) had sort of a convergent style – whereby everyone exercised an amount of refrain to make sure that the presentation style stayed more or less constant throughout.

When going through the Webinars, mine came up and it was considered too “proud and patronizing” at parts – even if it wasn’t my original intention. My guess was that the eye contact and the tone of voice contributed to this. I should take note that I don’t sound or look patronizing during my final presentation.