I am currently a teacher leader at my school (Ben Davis High School) which means that once a month I facilitate a time of professional development over a specific topic (which for me happens to be project-based learning). Another teacher who leads the same course that I lead kept referring to these great Prezi's that he was using in his classroom. I just thought he was using some new, hip slang for a PowerPoint Presentation, but come to find out, it's a whole new presentation tool, and it's free online at www.prezi.com.
There are certainly many similarities between PowerPoint and Prezi; however, Prezi allows you to visually represent the relationship between the big ideas and small ideas you are trying to present. It not only allows you to present the material, but you can present through the form of a graphic organizer, giving meaning to the significance of each point at the very moment you are making that point. Furthermore, the presentations just look cooler than they do in PowerPoint.
I modified a Prezi that my colleague had made concerning the use of authentic audiences in project-based learning, which I then presented this past Monday morning (Feb. 28th) to my colleagues during our professional development time (link below). I would like to continue using this website to create presentations for further professional development sessions. I am a math teacher, and a big downside to Prezi is that it does not have the capability to input math expressions like you can in PowerPoint, so I would only use it in limited contexts in my classroom. However, I could definitely use a Prezi when I am introducing a new project-based learning unit to my classes.
Authentic Audience Prezi
I watched my first Prezi last semester & it was such a cool experience! You prezi looks great & it's exciting to see how you & your colleague used it for professional development. I haven't explored it much on my own, but it looks like it could be A LOT of work to make it look so good. :) Lorie Pietz
ReplyDeleteBefore this class, I had never even heard of Prezi. How long would it take to learn to use this tool? I like PowerPoint enough to keep using it, especially if learning to use Prezi is very time consuming. Once, while I was an undergraduate student, I put together a PowerPoint presentation and was able to take some video I wanted to include to the video editing lab on campus and get help taking clips from different videos, combining them into a single clip, and insert it directly into my PowerPoint presentation so that I would not need to run it separately, which meant that the timing was worked out to play the video exactly when I needed it to play. It was pretty cool. Though I don't know if I could do that on my own using my computer.
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