I have a Prezi for the Students

A good presentation is all about communicating ideas to an audience for a purpose. One of my all-time favourite programs for presenting ideas is, Prezi. Prezi is a brilliant program which allows for a much more diverse and open-minded approach to design. It also a program which isn’t PowerPoint. Which every student see’s at least once, every school day.

Student engagement starts with trying something different. If we challenge the students by doing a class presentation with something out of the ordinary, we raise the chance of creating higher student engagement.

Technical Aspects

Prezi is an online ZUI (Zooming User Interface) tool, which allows users to zoom in and out of their presentation can display information that can be navigated through on either 2.5D or parallax 3D space on the Z-axis.

It has several tools which make it stand out amongst other programs, these are:

Prezi ZUI – the main concept of the program which is addressed above

Prezi Desktop – a downloadable program which allows for the creation of prezi’s in an offline situation, which allows them to be then stored on the device. Presentations created this way can be uploaded online so they can be accessed by multiple users.

Prezi Collaborate – an online tool that allows for up to ten users to co-edit and show their presentations in real time.

Prezi Viewer for iPad – app developed to allow students to view their prezi’s that are linked to their account.

Prezi has the ability to include; videos, images and audio. With its unique style of presenting content, Prezi can be an extremely power educational multimodal tool.

SAMR

Redefinition – Prezi allows for students to create vast presentations which can constantly be built upon with or without the collaboration of peers. This is something that students haven’t been able to do when using the normal schools programs such as PowerPoint haven’t been able to do before.

Modification – Oral presentations have always been left in the business or lack of in their PowerPoint Presentations. With the use of Prezi, students have the ability to go into great depth in topics, without creating busy noise. It also allows for a more engaging approach to the presentations as it moves around the screen, rather than presented simply slide by slide.

Augmentation – Functional improvement comes from the ability to be collaborative with other students in real-time, and does not need to be completed together using the same computer.

Substitution – when being used in the offline mode, this program can be a substitute for PowerPoint, with no functional change when presenting content and information.

The technical aspects of Prezi are innovative when it comes to incorporating them into the classroom environment. Prezi Collaboration is a brilliant concept that I would love to use in the classroom. To expand on this particular feature more, Prezi Collaboration allows up to ten people to work on a single Prezi, at the same time, in real time from their own devices. This would be a wonderful tool to use in HPE when comparing say a golf swing. The students would be able to upload their videos, images and audio into one presentation, then compare and contrast their performance against that of other students using the same Prezi. For myself I would use this as a backing tool when speaking on topics which need to go in to depth with rather than using PowerPoint.  

 

This is another example on how you can personalise and create a Prezi Presentation. This was used by using a desktop camera.

References

Prezi. (2015). Prezi. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prezi