Post #5: Reflection on Oral Presentation 2

I must say that the team did well overall! We took on the role of a cloud computing host and we indeed portrayed professionalism to suit our roles, starting with our formal wear to the way we delivered the presentation. We each have a different delivery style and portrayed a confident front when presenting. Frank gave an impactful opening with his expressive introduction while Christabel gave a concise and steady presentation. I also managed to pull it off quite well.

Initially, I was really nervous so I used a lot of “erm”s but later, when I became comfortable, my body language and my tone became more relaxed and reduced the use of pause fillers. Comparing to the first presentation, I have improved as I was more comfortable throughout the presentation and used the hand gestures more appropriately.

My concern is more on the presentation slides that we used. The slides transition would have been smoother if we used the conventional power point presentation instead of using the pptplex. It was difficult for me when clicking the slides for Frank because of the difficulty in adjusting the slide to the area Frank wanted to focus on. Perhaps I needed to familiarise with this program and conduct more rehearsals with my team to ensure better transition of slides. Also, I find that the function of showing all the slides in each section at once at the overview page eliminates the “surprise” element of the presentation. Hence, I would rather stick to using the conventional power point presentation to reduce distractions for the audience and inconvenience for my team.

During the Q&A section, we were taken by surprise when receiving the kind of questions posed to us especially Mr James’. His questions were definitely the most challenging ones and they kept me pondering on the chances of success if an actual cloud computing company was embarking on our project and approaching NUS to shift their server! Nevertheless, we managed to provide appropriate answers to the questions despite struggling to think of a suitable reply. I hope that my team continues to improve and perform even better for the next presentation!