Post #7 TED Talk: Before

In my previous two posts, I've talked about the difficult my partner and I have had even attempting to beginning writing our TED Talk. We did manage to get a draft done this past saturday as I mentioned in my previous post, but it was written between the hours of 11:30PM and 4:00AM, needless to say there was much more we needed to do. While we couldn't meet in person the following day, we were on Google+ video chatting and editing/adding to what we had written the day before. Most of our difficulty came when trying to find the time necessary to explain all of our process, display the final product it resulted in, and still have time to convey an overall message that we learned through this project. When we had everything written down that we planned to present, our entire presentation timed to be just under 8 minutes. We had to cut at least three minutes of our presentation out. We were stuck with how to possibly cut out such a large piece of what we had to do. Ultimately we decided it would be easiest to streamline our TED talk if we knew exactly what McPerl was looking for (yes, I am fully aware of the rubric but there's no problem with clarification, right?). So on monday, we stayed after and talked to Mr. McDaniels. His input could not have been more helpful in helping us decide what to keep in and take out of our presentation. He essentially recommended three things: don't worry about the grade, air more on the side of passionate rather than informative, and try to come up with an overall message others can apply to their life regardless of their project. The first two shocked me and he even admitted that "I know every other presentation in gifted has been much more rigid", but he made it clear this one should be different. We went home that night and and immediately made a ton of changes, first starting with taking out our explanation of a lot of the process, and focused on one in particular, scratching as this is what most people expect a DJ to be able to do and associate with the label of DJ when they hear it. We struggled trying to find an overall message from a project such as ours, but we managed to do it. Lastly, getting over the part of "don't worry about the grade." I do not believe McDaniels has ever uttered these words before in his life, and we certainly hadn't heard him say them before either. But we took his advise, and focused our efforts on displaying our passion and just trying to have a good time, while of course getting across our message. After much practice and refinement, we will finally be presenting tomorrow. I'm excited to show off what we've learned, and I hope people are ready for what we're bringing.