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Show and tell at work
You never think at the time, when you are about 8, that the times you bring in your Guinea-pig to school and tell the class how you bath it, what you feed it and how well it gets on with the bunny rabbit actually are preparing you for public speaking later in life. Indeed it was only today that I remembered back to that time and realised that other than just a fun and easy to plan lesson for the teachers, it was also an idea to build up our confidence.
A little while ago I gave a talk at the Techa Kutcha night (or 'Ask Later') about Usability testing - which I'm sure I shall write up at some point - I was so nervous, it was my first time talking at anything like that and I spent ages preparing, writing slides, rehearsing what to say etc. I gave the talk as a practice to people at work, it couldn't have gone worse if I had tried, it was a difficult format 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide but in my practice run i don't think I finished a single sentence, it was 6 minutes 40 of incomprehensible ramblings, thankfully after practicing again with Tom, the actual run went much better but it made me realise how bad I was at public speaking and I wondered if there was an easy way to get better at it.
Today at work I we held a 'show and tell session' for useful / interesting things we had found on the net, it was a nice relaxed atmosphere for us all to talk in a big group, I really believe that informal chats in a large group like that is indeed the easy way to get better at being confident at public speaking.
The content of the show and tell itself was high too, Sian showed the cool news ticker she had seen on the NME site Sally demonstrated Remember the milk, the to-do list application we both use (its really neat), JP found this ultimately cool flickr image search based on a colour wheel that I cant remember the URL for, Matthew stole the show though with his JavaScript demo, using nothing but native browser rendering techniques, so cool!
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