Sorry for the delay, guys. I was completely down with viral fever and bad cold. Basically, everyone has been either going down and has been recovering from viral fever i n the office. My roommate got it but I could resist the attack for more than week and fell to it last weekend. It took 5 days of antibiotics and rest with almost no work to recover. But I did push myself to go through my P7 and P8 speeches last week to make out for the losses of the slots. without wasting any more time, here I go.
For me, Toastmasters Speech 7 was a computer presentation and I won the Best Prepared Speaker award for the session. So, here I have the uploaded the same presentation here.
The speech will be more effective if we can support our main points with statistics, testimony, stories, anecdotes, examples, visual aids and facts. We can find this material on the Internet, at a library and in other places.
Use information collected from numerous sources and carefully support points with specific facts, examples and illustrations, rather than with just your own opinions.
- Collect information about your topic from numerous sources.
- Carefully support your points and opinions with specific facts, examples and illustrations gathered through research.
The script is as follows:
I worked on my project speech from home last night, but today I could not access the file from office – it was stored on my home computer. I captured a few good ideas for Table Topics, but I could not find that file – my files are scattered across 3 different computers. I drafted a speech for speech contest – unfortunately, my hard drive crashed and I lost that file. My friend forwarded a hilarious joke to me and I thought “WOW! I can use it next week when I play the Toastmaster of the Day” – but I could not find it in my mailbox when I needed it.
Do any of these situations sound familiar?
Have you ever wondered whether there’s a better, more efficient and effective way to manage our Toastmasters content?
Exactly 3 months back, I asked this question to myself and put forth the problem statement like this – “I want to access all my Toastmasters files from any location and any computer, so that I never lose a thought“? As soon as I posed this question, the answer was obvious – Internet. Internet is everywhere. I said “If I could put all my Toastmasters files online, then my problem is solved. Even better, if I could directly create, edit and store my files online, then I would be as free as a bird.” To find my answer, I turned to my most trusted companion – Google. Within a few minutes, I found the magic wand that I was looking for – Google Docs
Toastmasters’ Library
My first impression was that it was nothing more than an online Notepad. But I decided to give it a fair chance to prove itself, and it did not disappoint me. Gradually, I found myself accumulating material like jokes, quotes, short inspirational stories, table topics, etc. Not only was I working on my next project speech, I started drafting ideas for my next 3-4 project speeches. To my own surprise, within 2 months, I had built up a library of 50+ documents. Slowly but surely, Google Docs was growing on me.
Simplicity & Performance
Simplicity & Performance was what I was sold to. It is simple, fast, responsive and let’s you concentrate on your thoughts, rather than the bells and whistles of the tool. It gives you all the common MS-Word like features and some that even MS-Word does not provide.
Import / Export Files
You can import / export document to and from multiple formats like MS Office, Open Office and PDF.
Revision History
It has an extremely powerful revision history tool. As you can see it has recorded nearly 400 revisions of my document.
Ready-made for Toastmasters
Now here’s a look at some features, which really sealed the deal for me, and are ready-made for Toastmasters just as a tailor makes a cloth with proper measurements.
Online Collaboration
Online sharing of documents. Imagine that you have drafted your speech and want to have it reviewed by your mentor. Forget about email attachments. You can now share the document online with your mentor.
Online Publishing
You can even publish your speeches on the internet so that anybody, including your club members, can read them online. What’s more, you can directly publish your documents to your blog.
Word Count
Once you draft your speech, you can run a word count on your speech. From my experience, I found that my speed is about 100 words per min. So, if I have 7 mins for my speech, I should keep my speech around 700 words.
Readability Score
How do you tell whether your speech would be easily understood by your audience. Google docs provides you a readability score, which is based on a test used in the US to prepare academic content. It uses a scale of 0 to 100. The lower the score, the more difficult it is to understand. A text with a readability score of 65 is easily understandable by an average 8th grade student. So, as Toastmasters if we can keep the readability of our speech to around 65, we have a good chance of putting our message across to listeners successfully.
Online File Storage with Google Docs
Yes, Google Docs now allows online file storage. You can upload and store any file upto a size of 1 GB on Google Docs, and access it from anywhere, anytime. So upload all your Toastmasters related content online (even speech videos) and take a giant leap toward Toastmasters24x7 paradigm.
Toastmasters is not just about Public Speaking and Communication, it’s also about developing your Leadership skills. Constant self-improvement and effective personal organization are traits of good leaders.
As technology evolves, trick is to tame it and use it to our advantage. Google Docs is one tool that can really help you bring about improvement in your process of management of Toastmasters content, and make you a more effective Toastmaster, overall.
Just a word of caution – Online Data Security is always a matter of concern when storing personal content online. So, I advice not to store any sensitive / confidential personal or work related content online.
DeepakPanigrahy's Weblog 