Chances are, your students are tired of PowerPoint. It was catchy at first, but now your students are used to having lessons on the data projector.
They’ve seen bulleted lists fade in and out and they’ve watched slides go by one by one. PowerPoint doesn’t hook your students anymore. Been there, done that, and they’ve even written their own PowerPoints.
Prezi is the new PowerPoint.
If you haven’t used it before, then the flashy transitions will hook your kids. It’s cool.You know how you can zoom in and out of places in Google Earth – like you’re flying? Well, Prezi is a lot like that.
Instead of using slides, you have one big page that you spread your lesson over and then you zoom and twist around your page to focus on different ideas. check out the example Prezi by Paul Hill at the bottom of this page.
Here are some other great Prezis about making great Prezis:
After the initial wow factor fades away, Prezi is still a great teaching tool because you can jump around in your presentation instead of going slide by slide.
8 Reasons why you should switch to Prezi in the classroom
- Your Prezi presentations live in the cloud. This means you don’t have to worry about transferring files from your home computer to your school computer to your laptop… If you can access the Internet, you can work on your Prezi or show your Prezi. (It won’t work on an iPhone because you need flash, but they do have an iPad app.)
- Prezi is easy to use. Heck, your students will be able to create their own Prezis. Click here to type in text, upload images, or add borders (frames). Click and drag over there to resize your words or rotate your photos. Add in a flight path through your presentation and you’re good to go.
- There’s a full-screen mode. Take advantage of your entire screen or data projector space.
- You’re not limited to going slide by slide. At any point during your presentation you can zoom out and move around to a different part before continuing with your lesson.
- Get creative. Check out some of the other popular Prezis to get an idea of what you can do. Prezi is more than just jumping around, twisting and turning, and getting seasick. You can hide definitions below words, and show the big picture concept, before zooming into specific details. You’re only limited by your imagination.
- Creating and presenting Prezis online is free but your Prezis are published on Prezi.com. You can pay for premium features if you need more space, or you want to keep your Prezis private.
- Students and teachers can get a free eduenjoy (education) account which lets you keep content private. You can also put in your school logo instead of the Prezi logo in your presentations.
- It’s easy to embed your Prezi presentations on your class website. Just copy and paste the code. In fact, you can set it up so that your private Prezi presentations are on your class website but not visible in the Prezi showcase (which means that you don’t have to worry about students or the general public leaving comments on your Prezi.)
5 Downsides to Prezi
- You need the Internet. With PowerPoint, you can save the file on your computer and present it directly from your machine. But Prezi is an online service, and your file lives in the cloud… which means you need the Internet to edit your presentation or to show your Prezi.(If you’re willing to pay $159 per year for an EduPro account, then you can get the Prezi desktop application which will let you to edit and present your Prezis off-line.)
- You’re limited to the themes that they provide. Sure they have some very cool fonts and paragraph formatting, but if you want to bold a specific word in your sentence, you’re out of luck.
- Prezi doesn’t really have any image editing tools – you can only upload images to Prezi. You can’t even copy and paste. Prezi doesn’t have any crop features, so you really have to use a photo editing program to get your image the way you want it before you upload it to Prezi.
- Sometimes, Prezi seems to be a little glitchy. We’ve created last minute presentations on Prezi only to find that something didn’t save or sync properly with the cloud and so we lost a few words or images. (We’re playing with the desktop standalone application to see if things are any better. They have a 30 day trial version.)
- Sometimes we find moving around Prezi a little frustrating. We haven’t found an easy way to jump to the starting point of your presentation. Sometimes if you zoom out of your flight path and click somewhere else, it can be hard to get back to where you left off. Then again, this might be because we haven’t fully played with the program yet.
Visit the Prezi website.
This post was written using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Premium Wireless.