I discovered Prezi today via a bookmark from Dean Mantz. I spent about 10 minutes looking through the site, the tutorial and the three examples on the homepage.
Here’s what some are saying.
When it comes to presentations, Microsoft Powerpoint is the desktop tool that most of us use. Apple Keynote delivers better visuals and is preferred by creatives. Google & Zoho presentations bring a subset of the functionality to the web and allow collaboration. Slideshare introduces community – following the strategies of Youtube (video) and Scribd (documents). But Prezi flips the paradigm of presentation inside out to bring you simple interactive presentations like you’ve never seen before. (Source)
Prezi allows anyone who can sketch an idea on a napkin to create and perform stunning non-linear presentations with relations, zooming into details, and adjusting to the time left without the need to skip slides. (Source)
With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. (Source)
Josh Lowensohn of CNET stated that Prezi is a presentation creator that ditches the idea of individual slides in place of a giant expanse that can be navigated with a mouse, keyboard, and eventually touch screens. The end result is pretty incredible and feels a lot like Google Maps. (Source).
Educational Uses
I must admit that while browsing through the site I almost gave up and left twice, but I’m very glad that I didn’t! It’s an interesting tool and holds untold educational potential. Here are a few thoughts that came to mind.
- Presentations could become more dynamic, interactive and hopefully engaging. Prezi IS the message.
- The ability to easily incorporate most any digital file or media allows teachers/designers to account for a variety of learning styles (audio, video, visual, etc.).
- Prezi could be used as one of the (if not the) most robust concept mapping/semantic mapping tools that I’ve seen.
- Teachers and students could find it useful for organization, collaboration and project management.
- I like the idea of using Prezi to help during the design and development phases of lesson planning, unit development, team planning, cross-curriculum mapping, etc. In some instances (such as a typical presentation) your design and development work actually becomes part of the final product or learning artifact.
I found the creativity and ingenuity behind the product excellent. I think the zooming features, alternate fonts, direction of the slides and the option could be useful when introducing new information to students that could be defined as “boring” by them. What came to mind is a prezi that asked questions such as, “What do you think would have been the outcome if….” and then use the zoom feature to take the student narrowly down one road and then zooming out in the prezi to the real outcome and real details of a historical event. I agree that it could be great for organization, collaboration and project management in the classroom.
I’m planning to launch a Prezi project with 6th graders next week. Do you know of any tools, or have any ideas for students to plan their project before we jump on the machines?
Thanks