Group Presentation Thoughts

I really enjoyed being the sacrificial lamb when it came down to presenting the book chapters in the lab section one.  My group presented chapter 2 from the Rethinking book.  We decided to jump at the first group to attempt in order to kind of 'get it out of the way' and avoid being overshadowed by an unbeatable presentation from a preceding group.  There was a couple times leading up to our presentation for the chapter that we worried about presenting Chapter one.  Once we stopped worrying about how we were gonna align our work we met with Dr. Boyer with our ideas.  I felt that our meeting with Dr. Boyer really helped solidify our thoughts and backed the direction we were heading since no other group has modeled the discussions before.  One problem we had was finding time to meet after that original meeting to practice our lesson.  Jim started the Prezi and granted us all access to the project which was nice so we were able to toss information on there without meeting with a partial group.  One big problem was that in the last 24 hours our Prezi fluxed in the amount of pages and changed in order due to some conflicts of interest in our group.  The difficult part of our project was that we did not connect in the same programs which left one group member as a mediator, but also left me out of the 11th hour discussions when the slide order conflict arose.

When it came down to our presentation of the chapter I believe it went very well considering we went over the slide order minutes before class started because they were changed that close to class.  I believed our flow went well in our presentation.  We might not have moved around as much but wanted to point out our slides that were in the section we selected for ourselves.  I really focused on the video games that were out there in my grade schools when I was growing up and how they were like a simple stepping stone to what our chapter was focusing on.  I knew that I could zoom in on the pictures I had on my Prezi slide, but when I was aligning them on the slide on my computer I zoomed in and due to an issue with my computer it didn't retract immediately.  So then I was afraid of doing that during my presentation and embarrassing myself.  When I spoke of course I had in the back of my mind the thought of not saying the "ums", "likes", and "what nots" but of course I caught myself saying them.  I feel that I used my coaching voice and was able to project my voice well, but know that sometimes I get a increasing speed in my speech and become tough to understand.  I felt really proud after watching a couple other presentations that we were trendsetters with our presentation model.

I liked doing the project assignment because then it helps us teachers actually teach before being tossed into the classroom during our practicum.  Not only do we get to teach, but then we have discussions about the chapter which help us understand if we interpreted the chapter the same as our peers.  Probably the best part of the presentation is that we are able to get feedback from our peers and instructor on what they did and didn't like in the way we brought fourth our material.  When we get out in the field we usually won't get constructive criticism from our students on what they did and didn't like on our classroom presentations.