TED Presentation

Overall, I thought TED project was more successful this year than it was last year. The day of the presentations was more organized, especially because the three groups were in seperate rooms. This helped improve the quality of listening; the audience was more focused on the people presenting than on other things happening around the room.

Another thing that I liked about this year's presentations, was the guidelines. They provided an easy way to divide the work without forcing all the questions to be answered. One issue with this were the questions about how each presenter's idea relates to the Academy and how the Academy prepairs us for the future. Because these topics were listed under guidelines, they are don't necessarily have to be answered. After all, the guidelines were only their to inspire ideas and to get the projects started off. If this topic was in the guidelines, the teachers should've told everyone that it was needed in the presentation. It was unfairly one of the topics on the rubric. I know my group planned to include this, but a few groups failed to address this relationship; therefore, I don't think they should've been docked points. Although unfair, I think that this question was very important to the presentation, so each group should've included it without being told to do so.

One suggestion for next year is that we should be required to give a brief biography of the presenter. This woul heop determine why and how their organizations/causes got started. It's also nice to have the credentials of the presenter to prove that they are reliable people that actually know and have researched what they are talking about.

Throughout this project, I have realized that google sites is a much faster and easier program to use than wikispaces. My group, Open Source Architecture, had a really organized site. We were even able to embed a powerpoint from Google Docs onto our homepage. The only problem we had with our page was lack of visuals. I tried to add some pictures to represent things we talked about, but there was little effort from everyone elso to do the same. I wish we had some more time so that we could use other web 2.0 tools such as graphs on bubbl.us, imeem to add songs, and animoto to make picture slide shows.

Although the google site for my group was really well done, I thought our presentation could've run smoother with the video clips. We were unable to put specific parts of the video onto our powerpoint; so, we waisted time during our presentation trying to find the clips. I wish that our sites would've been due a week before the presentation so that the people that didn't work until the last minute would still have to get their work done, but the entire group wouldn't be pressured to also finish the presentation at the same time. This would give us time to work out some of the technical problems we had.

TED project was much more successful this year than last year, with a few minor technical difficulties.