Two tips to effectively presenting in a classroom setting

Presenting infront of your peers can be a very scary experience for some students. However, if you get past your nerves, presenting can eventually get to be fun. Here are a couple tips to effectively presenting in a classroom:

1. Practice, practice, practice
You can never practice too much for a presentation. Sure, many people usually get nervous when speaking in front of an audience; however, if you practice your speach enough that you become comfortable with the material then you will be less nervous when doing it infront of others. The more you go over your presentation, the less likely you will be to say, "um," or "like," or other filler words that lack professionalism and distract from the subject matter.

2. Be yourself.
While you want to be as professional as possible, you don't want your audience to not even recognize who is talking to them. Be yourself and be comfortable so that your audience can better relate to you. Make sure you actually make eye contact with your peers, just as you would in normal conversation. This help them to pay better attention when you aren't just giving your presentation to the back wall behind them.

When you follow these two tips it will help you to be more comfortable in front of your audience. When you are comfortable, your presenation will be much easier to relate with and more exciting for the audience to listen to. Your ultimate goal should be to inform your audience of the assigned topic, while making it as pleasing as possible for them to hear about it.

Response to Bryan Mortensen's blog

I read Bryan Mortensen’s blog entitled “Is job-hunting success more about who you know or what you know?”. I definitely agree with his analogy and think it applies perfectly to the job hunting scenario. However, the only thing I would add to is his comment about, “you can land a job with just a cake.” He is referring to the idea that you don’t need frosting (or in other words you do not need to know someone) to get a job. I agree, but I would add the fact that you might have to make a lot of cakes before you get someone to accept one without any frosting on it. When job hunting, it may take you a long time to find someone that will hire you that you are a complete stranger to. It will most likely take you a few tries to get a job when you don’t know anyone to give you a head start. I have had personal experience recently with this situation. Since I am new to Cache Valley I am without “frosting” whereas in Spanish Fork I knew plenty of people and could easily find a job. It is just going to take me a few tries of baking a frosting-less cake before someone realizes that I actually make some pretty dang good tasting cake