How we did our team-work presentation and how does "PechaKucha" work?!

In the last Communication Skills lesson, we have been asked to do oral presentations in groups, by using PechaKucha technique. Therefore, in this post i want to tell you our group experience about this presentation.

At the beginning i would like to give you a bit of information, related to our work. First of all our Professor divided us into groups of 4 people. Team - work , about "how to write technical report and make an oral presentation",  has been given on 17th of February, so we had enough time to prepare everything on time. So exactly on that day we started planning and dividing roles in our team. We wrote very good plan with all marks, explanations and main points. After what we started doing everything by using our plan. During last week we worked really hard and finished all writing and presentation work on time. The only problem was, how exactly to use PechaKucha technique. From here i would like to tell you what is PechaKucha, which technique is the best to use, how to speak and other useful information. 

So first things first, by the definition which is given in official web-site, "PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to images."

In our group, we started thinking about the best solution which we can find in order to do our oral presentation in PechaKucha format, and after 2 hours of thinking, researching, planning and trying, we finally found the best way to do it. Our decision seems very easy, on the other hand it's very useful.

Once one of the software CEO's (Jason Fried) said : " It's simple until you make it complicated". 

This phrase amazed our group, because it's so truth that you can't argue with that.

So what we

did, was to make every single slide of our presentation as much simpler as possible, without big text and only one image per slide. You can ask me why, and my answer will be  "make it simple". By cutting all text, we can control all presentation without any worries about time. Avoiding big amount of text, it helps to a speaker to bring all information to audience.

What exactly we did, was one sentence per slide or 2-3 bullet points, and no more. The best way which we found to fill 20 seconds, was reading from the slide together with audience and than add some information on top of it, while people looking at the picture on the slide.

We practiced quite a lot of times, so we know what are we going to speak about. Also we divided every slide in presentation between us, it should help us to be more efficient. In case if someone will forget their text, we have "insurance" that every team-mate learnt all slides by heart. We are going to present our work on the next lesson, so hopefully we will do everything how it should be.

Therefore in my evaluation i want to tell you that i found very useful to work in team, it showed me different aspects, such as making plans together, divide work between all group, create new ideas by using "brainstorm" and other different things. Also, i understood how important is to use your communication skills, in order to finish your work on time and not fail your colleagues.