After leaping over several technological hurdles, I've finally been able to post my Energy Conservation Project presentation here. Unfortunately my presentation was longer than the memory capacity of my camera, so the last few minutes were unavailable.

To be quite honest, I don't consider myself to be very good at giving presentations that will be seen by my peers, and so I was a bit hesitant to watch myself on video. I believe that I already had a decent idea of my areas in need of improvement, but seeing a recorded version of myself gave me a bit more objective view of things. I'll try to focus on the positive side first-- I didn't sound quite as incoherent as I felt like I was at the time. That's not to say it went as smoothly as I would have liked, but I think that my personal perception of my presenting abilities clouds my view in the moment and makes me assume the worst.

There is a fairly long list of things that I think I could improve upon. In no particular order, here are a few of them:

• Eye Contact: I need to face the audience more and the projection less.
• Pace: This is something that I have been working on, but still have difficulty with. I normally communicate at a very slow pace that betrays my rural Alaskan upbringing, but when I am doing any sort of public speaking I tend to speed up erratically. This is probably the most important presenting skill that I need to work on, considering the average pace of my students.
• Organization: Usually I do a fair job of organizing presentations, but for some reason I didn't feel that this particular one was well organized. I think part of the problem was that my talking points on the slides weren't clearly worded, leaving me with a few moments of gaping "uhhh..." while I remembered what I wanted to say.
• Confidence: My nervousness is still evident, though I think I have improved slightly over the course of time.
  
• Voice: This isn't actually something I could improve upon, but does anyone like to hear their own voice on video? I just plain sound weird...

Luckily, I'm much more comfortable in front of my students, and so my teaching tends to be a lot more relaxed and coherent than my peer-level presentations. However, pace is an issue that still comes up for me: while I generally have learned to take my time while lecturing in class, if something unexpected happens (technology issues, students leading the discussion too far away from the subject, etc.) I tend to speed up, which only exacerbates the issue. Hopefully, with a bit of effort and the gradual process of becoming more comfortable over time, I think I should be able to overcome this hurdle.