Pecha Kucha!

The making of

When the term “Pecha Kucha” appeared for the first time I was a bit puzzled. Not only was the word tricky to pronounce but also everything behind the word, namely a presentation of only 6 minutes and fourty seconds seemed only to be invented in order to annoy students at the ITAT. I have to admit: when our teacher told us we should prepare such a Pecha Kucha presentation for our English class I was everything but happy. I accepted my fate and together with my friend Dunja we chose “Bilingual Schools in Austria” as a topic. At first we started working on it individually: Everyone collected as much information as possible and pasted it in a Google document. When the deadline came closer and closer, we used class time in order to sort out what we can actually use for the presentation. Since my mother knows the headmaster of a bilingual school, we interviewed him via email and used the information he provided as a source for the presentation. Apart from this, Dunja talked with two children she knows who attend the GIBS. While working on it I increasingly sympathized not only with our topic but also with the Pecha Kucha presentation itself.

The preparation of our presentation went fine since we had many different sources and worked well as a team. The only problem we had, appeared during the recording of our transcript. Since we haven’t practised it before, we had to cut out and shorten down a lot of things so that the presentation wouldn’t be too long. If we ever have to prepare such kind of presentation again, I would definitely pay more attention to the length of the transcript beforehand so we don’t need to change everything again when recording the transcript. 

The product

All in all I was pleased with our presentation. Of course, we still made a few pronunciation mistakes but I guess it was quite okay. I had thought we would have problems with the time management (talking only 20 seconds for every slide), but since we had changed the transcript so often, we could perform it more or less smoothly.

When watching the other presentations, I was amazed at the topics: I still can’t decide which topic was the most interesting one. Everything was very well researched and the students knew a lot about their topics. Also the presentation themselves were good if not excellent. This has shown me that a Pecha Kucha presentation can be great fun to prepare and also interesting to listen to!