Reflect on the video recordings of your presentation. Did you observe anything interesting about your presentation that you may not have noticed while presenting? Did you look as scared/confident as you felt when you were presenting? What other interesting observations do you note from the recording?
Reviewing a video record of my presentation made me scared at first. Even before watching my recording, just receiving an email from my professor that my group presentation has been uploaded and opened for us to view made me anxious. I was thinking to myself about how nervous and unprepared I was during the presentation. I know from experience that my presentation skills are lacking since throughout High School, a lot of my teachers commented how terrible my presentation skills are. It was terrible enough that some of my teachers have told me that they would ignore my presentation assignment since it was not a good reflection of my knowledge and unfair to me since English was not my first language even though English is my dominant language.
Going back to the topic, after watching my presentation, I felt that I have really improved my presentation skill. I noticed that I use a lot of repetitive hand gestures throughout the presentation. I question the need of repetitive hand gestures since it does not seem to flow nicely. In addition, I noticed that I only look at the camera rather than the audience itself. I believe that is a flaw in my presentation. I should have looked around at the audience to maintain eye contact. I believe this would have made my presentation much more effective. Furthermore, I also noticed that I stall time to remember what I should say by saying “umm like”. This clearly shows that I was either nervous or a lack of preparation since I do not clearly know what to say. However, all these details are quite expected since I had barely prepared for the presentation. Just an hour before my presentation, I barely was able to even recite my lines but during the presentation, I managed to recite what I needed to say. I did not have much enthusiasm for my presentation and so it was not that interesting. But as I said, I am quite happy how the presentation turned out since I am now making more eye contact then before and not mumbling behind my script. Even though my presentation may not have been the greatest and have many flaws, just seeing an improvement is enough to make me satisfied with the result I have. I usually never look at the class when presenting since I get very nervous and constantly look over my script while presenting if I do bring a script. Based on the recording, it seems like I was a bit nervous but I managed to get through the presentation without breaking down.