Mid-term reflection

Hi all, it's good that we eventually finish our mid-term presentation.
In the following is our reflection about this presentation and the course so far.

Question 1:
Which part(s) of the speech preparation do you feel is/are more difficult than you thought? What problems did you encounter?
A. Deciding on a topic
B. Developing an outline
C. Collecting data
D. Writing the speech script
E. Creating Visual aids
F. Being a critical listener
G. Giving a speech in public (For speakers only)

>>>> >For us, part A(Deciding on a topic and part G(Giving a speech in public) are difficult for our team.
About part A is becasue most of our time is actually spending on deciding a suitable topic.
At first, we did come up with a few ideas, however, we didn't think any of them are any good. We want to find a topic that would really attract people's attention. Later on, when we camp up with "Super Size Me", we were so glad. We finally got kind of idea what directions are we going to see. But inside this documentary movie it talks about a variesty of ideas & issues, which is too board for 5 minutes presentation. So instructor suggests us to narrow down our topic, we then decided to talk about "Disadvantages of obesity".
About part D is really beyond our expectionation. I mean we are all very confident about our speaker and believing in that we would do a great job. Becasue during our preparation, everything works well. However on the deliver day, there are some problems occured. Our speaker(Sandra) suddenly felt nervous and forgot the scrips. Although she felt really want to quit the stage, she still tried her best to finish the presentation. For this presentation, she stayed up to make sure she memoried every single words. We believe it must be lack of sleeping and neverous so she didn't make it as perfect as before. However, we still feel she did manage it okay.

Question 2:
Most of you used visual aids. If you did, did the preparation of visual aids take more time than speech script writing? Do you think your use of visual aids was successful?

>>>>>We use powerpoint slides helping us to deliver our presenation more smoothly. Our slides are like the keywording outlines of the whole speech. We also included two video clips to help our audience to know more about it.
We actually didn't spend a lot of time on it, we finish it within one working day. Becasue it's main content are just the keywords from our outline. All we have done is editing the video and make the ppt looks more presentable.
We believe our visual aids is really helpful and successful. We notice our audiences pay attentaion to our slides and they are quite amazed about our videos. We are glad about this.


Question 3:
In your speech, did you use/cite any information you collected? Could you share with us the sources of your information?

>>>>>We did mention where our information from in both our speech and the ppt slides.
They are all from the DVD of "Super Size Me". If anyone is interested about it, they can viewed this DVD at school's libary or rented at Blockbusters.

If there's anything else you'd like to share with your class besides the 3 questions above, please write it down.

>>>>> We have other ideas about this presentation and the course.
First, we feel it's a bit stressful for one speaker to handle a 5 mins speech. For her might feel if she didn't presentated it well, she would feel sorry for the other team members. We suggest maybe everyone should participate the presenation, like one person resposible for intro, one person for the body, one for the conclusion...etc. It would really reduces and share the neverousness of the speaker.
Second, about stress again. We felt we taken a lot of pressure about this presentation. For we worry if we didn't do it well, our score for this couse would be low. Becasue so far, we only have this mid-term presentation and seems like our next exam would only be the final presntation. Our score for this course would only be evalutated by those two presentations. We suggest maye we can have more presentations in-class or paper exams to share the overall score.

^_^ That's all about our reflection part.

And about brainstorming the persuading speech topic, we have only come up with one topic now.

- Discrimination

We are still working on more topics.

Cheers

Late draft outline @@"

Hi all~ Sorry to updated our outline one day late. (Due to many reasons-mainly becasue the next week is mid-term)

Okay~Here's what we have done this week during the class.
1. We handed in our draft for teacher to check.
*Generally she felt is okay. Quite organized. Except our topic is a bit unclear.
2. We shared our draft with other team.
*^_^They gave us some recommendations, such as adding one more idea into body section and asking if we have any back-up plan if the computer isn't working...etc

The following is our revised outline:
Topic: Disadvantages of Obesity

(1) Attention-getting opener: Is anyone addicted to eating fast-food? I certainly consider that most of you shall go to fast-food restaurant once or twice a week. This kind of fever also happens in America.

(2) Preview: We’ll let you realize the three major disadvantages about obesity.
a. Health
b. Appearance
c. Inconvenience

(3) Body:
a. Health: According to a statistics by the movie, Super Size Me...
b. Appearance: People who are overweight always give us an image with sluggish and unclean.
c. Inconvenience: Daily life inconvenience; such as, difficult to find suitable size clothes, can’t sit on a standard chair...etc.

(4) Summary: You should realize the three disadvantages about obesity.

(5) Memorable concluding remarks: In conclusion, obesity is liked an invisible killers hid on our life. If you don’t pay attention to it, you will get trouble with it. Be sure you have a regular exercise and balanced diet.

Thank you all for coming to see our blog. We appreciated it.
^_^ Your commends, our energy to work~

It's good to get some feedback, so we know what we have done and what is not really suitable etc.~

Cheers all (Hope we all pass the mid-term successfully)

Getting started!

Hi all, thanks for came to view our site and gave us your opinions. I have also viewed other groups blogs. However, I still can not find some groups. I hope to see them being put on soon~

Alright, I will now tell you what we have discussed today during the class.

First of all and the most imporatnt is that we have decided our topic Super Size Me.
I think some of you must have either heard about it or even have seen it. Well, if you don't know anything about it which is a good news for us. It means it fits to this mid-term scenario that it would be a informative speech for sure.

Hints: It's a documentary about McDonald's. ^_^ To know more about it, you can check out on this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersize_me

Secondly, here's what we wrote down on "Narrowing Your Topic".

On page One:
I want to know more about/give information on...
What was the intention of this project?

My revised topic: Super Size Me Project.

On page Two:

Who could gather it?
Everyone who is interested in this topic.
Where could it be gathered?
Movie, Internet, Magazines and Newspaper.

About Visual Aids, we feel it's rather imporant for our presentation.
We have plan to use powerpoint slides to help our audience to understnad more.
However if there are any problems occurs due to the technican reason, we would use print out copies of the slides instead.

Thirdly, as teacher has requested to day, we will try out best to come up with the draft of our presentation ASAP by next week. (For our speaker,Sandra, has made this demand as well, so she has enough time to prepare for it.)

At last, I am going to talk about how we come up with this topic. I know it is not shown on our brainstorming list. Well, it is because we just came up with it yesterday. During our friends' birthday party, we went to an all-you-can-eat Thai restaurant. After the food, I felt we were really piggy. Then, "Super Size Me" suddenly appear in my brain. I then, immediately discuss it with my team members. Luckily, all of us eventually agree with this topic. We all found it interesing. However, I am the only one who has seen it. So today after the class, all of us went to the libary and watched it. (^^the school has the DVD) We all now understand it more, and are undergoing with our draft.


Cheers

Opening~

Hi guys(Peter& Sandra), here's our blog for this mid-term presentation. I hope you like this template. (Well, there aren't many default templates I can choose)

Alright, if you have no opinions over the above issue. Then, I will write down what we have discussed during today's class. (26/Oct/05)

First, we have decided each roles.

*Speaker: Sandra

(for you are good at given excellient & surprising presentations)

*Listener& PR : Peter

(for you are willing and nice to take this multi-jobs work)

*Writer: Fion

(for I am really good at writing too many words on the blog)

Second, we have done brainstorming and here are the draft ideas we come up with.

1. Muslim ladies

2. Clone human?

3. Arabic's 10 wifves.

4. Plastic surgery(Cosmetic surgery)

5. Bluetooth technology

6. Organs donation

7. Future technology

8. 3M company

Those I highlighted with different colours are the one that either of us are interested in.

However, we haven't make our final decision for our topic yet.

Please either finding more interesting topics or vote on the one that you really wanted to do of this list.

Cheers