Alison and I were at first both stumped over what topic to use for our peer teaching. Finally we asked each other, what are we good at? Alison mentioned she had recently helped a friend of her dad’s set up a profile on one of the dating sites, called gofish.com. I had also had some experience with the online dating world, having tried it out myself, so we decided, why not teach others how to successful use online dating sites! Both of us had been to main dating sites such as eHarmony and match, however once we started to research, we found out there were plenty more than we realized. There was no way to compare them all, so we decided to focus on certain ones.
Since we could not afford to pay for memberships to each site, we were fortunate in that many sites allowed you to have a free trial, and several were actually free. At first we just browsed the sites to see how they worked, but then we narrowed our focus. We asked ourselves what we would want to know about online dating if we didn’t have a clue what it was about – which is how we came up with the idea of the WWW theme – Who (can you meet and how), What (can you find), and where (do you go to meet them).
We took notes on what our findings were, and then prepared the power point to guide people through. We wanted the handout to be something useful, to contain something people would want to hold onto and could use in the future should they decide to go and try online dating. While searching reviews of dating sites we came across the site that had tips for taking better photos of yourself for online profiles. Now this may seem like a silly idea, however when putting dogs and cats up for adoption, the photo you put up I know is extremely important, and there are definitely do’s and don’ts for that as well as how to write their biographies. Because of this, I thought that perhaps many people are not aware of how much of a difference a good photo or biography can mean, so we decided to give people a copy of those tips. In addition, we felt that a list of the sites we had checked out would be helpful, along with safety tips, as many people seem to underestimate the problems that can result from an unhealthy match made online. We decided then to try to find something funny for the last part of our handout, and settled on a “lingo” cheat sheet, as some of the ads we found were hard to decipher!
In reflecting on the assignment as well as reading the responses, I feel overall we did a good presentation as people seemed genuinely interested in what we had to say. I wish we had rehearsed the actual presenting more, while we had an outline we had made for presenting, we both felt that it was important to have the presentation be more conversational than strictly formatted. I felt that this may have hurt our presentation somewhat, because Alison and I both have different speaking styles, and unfortunately neither one of us has psychic capabilities, so are not able to know what the other person is about to say or tell the other person what to say. That being said, I felt that though there may have been some stumbling during the presentation, that it was overall successful, and the responses we received seemed to reflect that as well.
