Day 3: Practicing Presentation Skills by Ashwin Rhodes

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July 2nd, 2019

Day 3: Practicing Presentation Skills
by Ashwin Rhodes

Today we did lots of activities and learned many things, but the most impactful part of today was the presentation workshop we did this evening. This evening we broke into three groups so that we could practice for our presentations tomorrow, and in our groups we went to three stations.

The first station focused on the tone and pacing of your speech. We were given a piece of paper with a prompt on it and we then had to talk about it for one minute, with no preparation. I got to talk about cars which I love, so my speech was easy and I did pretty well, except that I forgot to look at Mrs. Moerder at all. Everyone in my group did well, which made me feel better for tomorrow when we have to give a presentation together. At this station, I learned to better connect with my group as we learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses. 

At the second station, the focus was filler words like "umm" and "so". Every member of the group was given a clicker and when the presenter used a filler word the whole group would click at them. I went first, drawing the topics of cousins and technology for my two speeches. I delivered both with no mistakes, which I was very proud of but the audience was a little upset because they were waiting for the chance to click me. At this station, I learned how to focus because it took a lot of concentration not to say those filler words.

At the third station, we focused on body language and I had some room for improvement. My hand gestures were good, but I had a tendency to stand in place and sway which I need to work on. At this station I learned that I still had lots of room to grow and I learned what I needed to work on the most.

After all the stations we came back together as a big group and performed a longer impromptu speech in front of everyone. For this speech, everyone filled out a written scorecard with a maximum possible score of 28 and the highest rank of “Superior Presentation Skills” at 25 points. On all of my cards, I got a score of 25 or higher. Tits made me feel much more hopeful for our presentation tomorrow.

This presentation workshop was my favorite part of the day because it was very fun and helped us prepare for our presentations tomorrow. It also helped us connect as a group and showed us that we all have room to grow.

Ashwin and his research group "Ice" (Julia, Chloe, Cha, David, and
SIO researcher Maya) after presenting about sea level rise.

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