This week, everyone did their final presentations. I did mine on Tuesday, so in this post I’m going to talk about my experiences as both a presenter and as an audience member.
Preparing for this presentation was a difficult experience for me. I don’t remember if I addressed this in my blog during the last round of presentations, but something that made this process really difficult for me was that the presentation was due before the essay. This meant that I had to write the essay long before the actual due date. I understand that we need the class time to do the presentations, but if I’m going to have to write the essay in order to do the presentation, then why not just make the essay due date before the presentation? That way we could have time to meet with Annalise and make sure that our topic is strong and well researched before making the presentation.
The one thing that I did like about having the presentation due after the essay was that making the presentation helped me structure my essay. I basically used my slides as mock body paragraphs for my essay and that was a really useful way for me to organize my thoughts before diving into the essay.
From the perspective of an audience member, I personally had a really great experience. Something that I noticed from the beginning, was the improvements and adjustments that people made since the last presentation. It was clear that many people took the TAG form from the last presentations seriously and it was cool to see people applying their feedback in this presentation.
I am not a person who liked the TAG form in any capacity. It distracted me from actually focusing on my peers’ presentation. Also, during my presentation, seeing everyone on their computers made me feel like no one was paying attention to me. I felt like I was talking to a room of zombies! Maybe if the TAG form was on paper instead of digitally it might help with the level of distraction.
Overall, I thought that these presentations were really interesting! I honestly struggled to come up with a topic to research. I loved seeing everyones presentations and how creative many peoples’ ideas were. Some of my favorites were Sophia’s presentation on letters to Santa, Marc’s presentation on love letters in the music industry, and Melina’s presentation on prison pen pals. These were all ideas that I never would have even thought of. I feel like we think of letter writing as being an old-fashioned and practically extinct art form, but I think that these examples are proof that the art of letter writing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
