As summer begins to wind down, I
thought I would play around with a new presentation tool I heard about at the
MABE conference last spring, Prezi. Some
of you may have heard of Prezi, but if you have not, it is a free online presentation
program that blows power point out of the water! Unlike PowerPoint, which presents slides in a
linear fashion, Prezi gives the creator a much more dynamic environment to work
with resulting in a more interesting experience for the viewer i.e. my students. The basic Prezi account is free, but educators
with a school email can also get a free upgrade that gives you five times more
storage, your own logo, and the option to make your presentations private. I’m a big fan of keeping my presentations
private since I may be making future Prezis with my students, or with pictures
and names of my students. I’m not really
sure to what extent I will be incorporating Prezi into my lessons, but knowing
they will not be available to the public gives me many more options.
As with
any new program there was a slight learning curve as I adapted to this new paradigm
of presentations and tested out how the program itself. After playing around with the program for
about 20 minutes I felt comfortable with the basics and decided to get started
on a real Prezi. Since I’m sure I will be discussing what I did
this summer with my students, I decided that would be the topic of my fist
Prezi. I quickly found a template I
thought was appropriate for my topic and got started. Once I learned the basics it was really
pretty easy and to be honest kind of fun making my presentation. It’s not much, but here is my first Prezi,
Mr. Van Over’s Summer.
If you are interested, I encourage
you to check out the site. My presentation
only scratches the surface of the cool things you can do with Prezi. I think your students will enjoy it and so
will you. Don’t forget to get the
educator upgrade. It’ free and only
takes an extra minute to setup.
I’d love to hear from you!
Do you already use Prezi?
If so, what do you think?
How do you plan to use Prezi in your classroom this year?
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