Danny Leons Blog

  As my first presentation in this class, I found having to speak up and present is nerve wrecking. As a student and as a public speaker having to present can take up a lot of you and having to memorize certain words to be able to present well is also something that can make anyone nervous. As a sum of it all I enjoyed the presentations as my group presented, I learned much from the chapters 1-4 and as each student in my group presented, they all sounded confident. The presentation that each group had to do was about reading the chapters and each group dealt with presenting well. As the presentations began there was some students that had stuttered or lost the train of thought, but they had gotten back on track.  As for myself I dealt with the same issues but one thing that did occur was the after some time of the presentation it had gotten a tad repetitive, and some students were saying the same things. The presentations had made a lot of people nervous, and it shows that as much as we can read about not being nervous and ways to prevent it, we cannot prevent the inevitable. Presentations are a nervous thing to do and as students and as myself I found this task to be slightly hard. To be able to present is something not everyone can do, and it can be different for everybody and have different outcomes. Most of the students have this same problem as me and having to deal with it results in many ways. Dealing with the nerves can be handled in various different ways and in the moment, there are ways to handle it. Some of the students deal with this issue including myself and something I think would be good to have index cards on the side. Having index cards with key words and certain words can help in these scenarios as I did. I had a note on my phone to help with my speech, without notes or key words it can be hard to remember everything that you need to mention. If you just, try to talk for the presentation without making some notes this is where you start to fumble on your words and stutter and start to sweat. I see that in this presentation a lot of students surprisingly prepared for this and a lot of them spoke well. Having a perfect speech is almost impossible but the ways to get it close to perfect are possible. There were some presentations that lacked a little bit of confidence but its normal for the first presentation. Most of the students had some moments where they would stutter and forget the words but as students we learn, and we grow from our experiences, and this is a learning class and once done we hopefully should all be able to present better than average. The average of students in this class are fairly new in the blog and speech including myself. But although this is new, we are able to learn from everyone and as I listened to everyone speak, I learned a little about each presentation. For instance, in my group, we spoke about the fears of presenting and how getting better at presenting can excel in other areas such as having better communication skills and having better team bonding skills and good customer service. These qualities as a worker and a person look really good and is able to help with the work life as well. In my group we also had spoken about how to reduce anxiety and what to do and what to say. In all the presentations there was students speaking about these strategies and learning this from a presentation is a lot better for me to learn then reading off a book. As a student I learn more visually from pictures or from hearing talk about it, while studying I usually have to watch videos to learn. From the presentations I learned a lot of information and is very helpful, learning from the other students about certain chapters. If it was a different course and I would have to read and learn about certain chapters, I would be less likely to retain and remember the information since it is a lot of reading. That is why when it comes to learning I succeed more in hearing speakers speak or teachers speak, and I retain the information easier. Although this is only the first presentation, I know that all the students will grow from this, and we will get better and be more confident when speaking. Although all i have spoken about is good things how the presentation went there was some things I think as a group and as individuals we can learn from and be better at. For instance, the reading straight from the notes and not having certain examples of your own. For example, I have this issue because having examples of certain ideas can show the listeners a visual of what you are talking about. As well having certain pictures and graphs that relate to what is being spoken about. Having only pictures is just fine but there should be some words or phrases to match the pictures. In my opinion I am fine with just pictures, but this would be more for the listeners that are listening to the words the speaker is saying, and they can read over some the phrases you have mentioned so they may not be lost. Overall, those are all the problems I had seen from the presentations, they are small details, but the small details make the big difference. I feel like if we work on the small mistakes, we will be able to handle the following presentations way better and they will help us in the future. The presentations will be improved for the next and the following and once this class is over, we will be able to speak and not be nervous and we will all be confident.