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Luke Jordan Lyman Barner Dr. Lauren Mason ENGL 1101H 15 September 2013 A Reflection on My In-Class Presentation I underestimated the amount of time that creating and practicing my presentation would take, and so my overall feeling about the end product is that it seemed rushed in more ways than one. I think the creation process that I used was acceptable, and that there werent any glaring flaws with it beyond not giving it enough time to work as effectively as it could have. That failing impacted the in-class presentation very negatively in my opinion, but now I know how to avoid making the same mistake in the future. When the project was first discussed in class, there was a lot of enthusiasm when we all decided to work on parts of it in a group, but we discovered that our lack of organization caused us to distract more than help each other and created an environment that was not conducive to productive work. We knew that having access to peer-review could greatly improve our projects, however, and so a few of us chose to work in a smaller group. That afforded us the benefits of collaborative work without as much distraction. From there, we completed our working outlines and began working on our mind-maps. Lizzie and I discovered that Prezi made it easier to move directly from topic to topic without having extraneous information on the screen. Using the same mind-mapping tool also made it easier for us to cooperate and help each other with our projects. Working one-on-one with

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each other and using the same tools, Lizzie and I seemed to have found a good formula for collaborative work. The flaw in our strategy was that we did not discover that formula until we had a very limited amount of time to use it. By the time I finally finished my Prezi, I had run out of time to rehearse it extensively, and so I ended up cutting out more material than I needed to in order to stay under four minutes. While the most important content stayed unchanged, I feel that a lot of the supporting content that, while not vital, would have contributed positively to the presentation was lost. My inclination is that good time management means making effective use of all of the time that you are given with which to present. I left enough time on the end that I could have, at the very least, gone into more detail on the content that I already had in the Prezi. This is where my presentation felt rushed in the classroom, in addition to my having to rush its creation. Above everything else, I think this assignment has taught me that time management is a serious weak point that I need to address for further assignments in this class, and throughout my college career. This will allow me to be not only more efficient, but also to create better work and make better grades across all of my classes.