20 Time Final Post

Recently, I was able to complete the TED Talk that we had to do for our project in class, and the video of it can be seen below:

Personally, I think I did better than I expected on my TED talk, although I definitely have some things that wished I could have improved upon. I had expected to forget some important part of my presentation, such as including the 3 references to outside sources or forgetting to even mention my finished product, which was my compost bin and pile. However, I did think that I could have been less nervous during my presentation and cut down on the unnecessary filler words, like "like" and "uh". That is something that I think could have only been reduced with more practice and experience, which I will take with me for future presentations or public speaking occasions. Confidence when presenting a topic has always been a rough spot for me, so this experience in general has been quite helpful for me in forcing me to focus on an area that I am not all that comfortable with. I tend to be better at writing my thoughts and researching information about a subject rather than presenting about it, so the overall experience of planning for and writing my presentation will help me improve in the future. I decided to go the way of writing out my script and trying to memorize the gist of it instead of creating an outline that I would bounce off of during the presentation, and I realized not only how long it takes to write everything out, but also how hard it is to remember everything word for word. Because I am not a person that improvisation comes naturally to, I think the technique of writing down the basic framework of sentences for my key ideas will come in handy in the future, as long as I space out my time evenly.

As for the rubric, I would probably give myself a 73/75, missing points in the voice and enthusiasm category as I feel that my voice was kind of monotone throughout the presentation and it may not have seemed that I was as excited about my project as I could possibly be. Overall, my take-away from the task of creating and presenting my TED talk is that confidence is truly the key to any presentation: once you believe in yourself and the preparation that you have done, all that is left is to do is to be yourself in front of however many people you present to. Additionally, I thought that being able to watch others' presentations before me was not only helpful in giving me suggestions on how to improve my own public speaking, but also in learning more about the various topics that were covered and getting me interested in new information that I had possibly not heard about before.