Sara Inoue

Throughout this whole term I learned and gained knowledge about communication, presentation teamwork and many other things. I remember the first lesson I had with Mr. Paterson I was surprised about numerous things.  For example the first thing he mentioned was that he would not be giving out papers and prints in his class and instead we would be working on computers. This made me very surprised since I hadn’t used computers in class after moving to japan. As many lessons passed I started to realize how convenient it is to not keep sorting out piles of paper. The fact that one computer can change the way we work in class and make various situations more easier had a very positive effect. Mr.paterson taught us the good points and how to make presentations that will be impressive.  The group presentation we gave about utilizing classroom spaces allowed us to find new problems around our school that we would have probably never noticed or thought of because we don’t usually have...

For the first lesson of July our group got our feedback and comments from Mr. Paterson. He mentioned as a group we need more preparation as well as credibility. For the presentation I wasn’t able to say what I prepared smoothly because of my lack of practice. I also need to improve to not say “like” as much. After watching the video I realized that I tend to say “like” when I’m finding the words to express my feelings. I thought this wouldn’t happen if I practiced a lot and get used to presenting.  He told us that we would be presenting again after the summer break and our group has a lot of things to improve and fix. My goal is that when the next time I present I want to be happy with the work I did and satisfied with the work.

In this lesson I found out about many new things. The most interesting part was when mr. paterson meantioned about asking question and greening the listeners attention while presenting. It is said that people’s concentration only lasts for about 8 minutes which I thought was very interesting. The main thing is what we can do to grab their attention and make the audiences be interested in our presentation for the whole time.  What came up on my mind first was that if all the interesting facts are told in the beginning it may wake the audiences up. However they would gradually get bored if there is nothing important to listen as the presentation goes on. So what I thought was that we should add interesting facts and possibly some questions in between other things that are less interesting to wake the audiences up.

 In Wednesday’s class our group stood up at the front and since Yuna was absent the day before she presented her part. After we finished a few other groups also presented and I noticed that most of the presenters took the advice that mr.paterson gave which was to walk whilst talking so that the audiences from both sides of the classroom can have eye contact with the presenter. When they are walking in front it grabbed my attention and it made me think that our group also need to improve on our body movements and the posture we show to our listeners.   By listening to the other groups present it allowed me to find the differences and similarities that every group had amongst them. As mr.paterson said the credibility was very important and our group lacked to have more credibility. What we can do is to have more pride and talk louder to wake up the audience and grab their attention.

This is the day for the presentation. Unfortunately one person was missing from our group and we were not able to present all together. We explained the information that we gathered in the passed two months. However we had numerous problems and our presentation ended up being very poor. The lack of credibility throughout the whole presentation Was one of the main problems. We need to improve on the tone of our voice and be able to speak smoothly without saying “um”, “like” etc.  Things that I need to improve is to not stand behind the desk since it puts an object between the audience. I noticed after watching the video of our group that I wasn’t able to get my opinion and what I wanted to say out and because I was nervous I kept repeating the same idea over and over which I definitely need to work on.