Prezi - EDED20491 Week 5 Post #2

Engagement Activity 4: Creating a zooming presentation in Prezi

Sign up and make your own for no charge at http://prezi.com.

The best tutorial available is at Prezi - http://prezi.com/learn/getting-started/

When you view the prezis you have made, you will see, on the right hand side a number of options. These include an embed code so you can embed it in your blog (remember, use the html edit tab to embed code). You are also given the option to download the prezi to your computer and carry it on your USB stick.

Prezi is also available as a mobile app.

I first used Prezi last year to create a conference presentation for EdMedia 2012. I had heard of Prezi early in 2012 through the blogs and twitter feeds that I read regularly and it was a tool that I wanted to explore. It took a little while to understand how Prezi works because the editing tool has a different interface to anything  I had used before. When you do learn how to use Prezi the editing tool is very intuitive and easy to work with it. Powerpoint had served me well for many years but it has a traditional interface and the products tend to be very linear and each page is the same size. Prezi has a completely different design that allows you to create presentations that can zoom in or out and the user can explore a Prezi by moving around the screen. Of course you can set a linear path through Prezi to guide the viewer too.

Below is a link to a presentation that I did for the CQU library staff earlier this year. I created it in my Prezi account and set it up to share publicly. This too was a simple and straightforward process.



Prezi was designed and created by people working in the field of architecture and that shows in the way the tools are designed for ease of use and also because Prezi is a tool meant to provide visual impact. It is freely available on the web on PCs, Macs and mobile devices. It has many features that you can use on a free subscription such as making your Prezi's public and being able to download a presentation copy that can be run from your computer or other device without being connected to the web. There are more features available to the user if you are willing to pay for a subscription.

To create a Prezi with great impact it pays to plan ahead to decide on your overall message and then work out how best to present it using the unique zooming facility. One feature of the website that I really like is that if the creator of a Prezi allows it you can copy their Prezi to your own location and adapt it to your own needs. Of course you would need to acknowledge the original authors's work. 

The following is a Critical reflection of using Prezi in teaching materials. The analysis is scaffolded using a  PMI.

Pluses	Minuses	Interesting/Implications
Free tool available for educational purposes. The paid version allows you to download Prezi onto your computer or device and work off-line.	It was a bit difficult to work out how to use it when I first started. Once you understand how the editor works it is fairly intuitive to use.	Incorporation of many multi media forms ie, video, audio, links to web pages, blogs, wikis, etc Limited only by your imagination.
Easy to create and edit a professional looking presentation. Students can use to create presentations or other artefacts. Could be used by even very young children.	If people use too much zooming or they zoom too quickly it could make people motion sick. Need to think carefully about when to zoom and how it adds to the understanding.	Informal learning is happening when the students engage with the Prezi and learn how to use it. The skills they develop are transferable to other technologies.
Students can work individually on a Prezi or you can work collaboratively.	Teacher needs to scaffold the tasks so that the students are guided in their learning.	The Prezi website has many videos and links to sites that show you how to use Prezi.
The student has control of what they create. Prezis allow students deviate and explore things in a non-linear manner.	When editing you need to be VERY careful about placement of the mouse. Sometimes when you think you are using the mouse to scroll across the screen you realise that you are zooming in/out.	You can search for Prezis on a topic that you can use as a teaching tool. If the Prezi has been made reusable by the author you can copy them to your own area and edit them with due acknowledgement.
Available for others to view (external to the group) and from anywhere in the world. Can also set it to private if you don't want your work to be seen by people outside the classroom.		Available on PCs, Macs and mobile devices - very portable.
Ability to add multimedia to the Prezi.		Can upload your existing PowerPoint slides into Prezi.

Other applications to assist in using Prezi:

Prezi has a lot of material available on the website to assist people to learn to use the features. See:
http://prezi.com/learn/

There is a plethora of Prezis available either to view or to reuse. The website has an excellent search facility.

Reflection on using Prezi in eLearning

I just LOVE Prezi. I found it easy to learn and intuitive to use. I think that one of the reasons I am so attracted to it is that I am a strong visual learner. Prezi is all about visualisation. Though it has the ability to upload sounds too and you can record a narration to accompany the Prezi.

I can envisage many ways to utilise Prezi in my teaching both for me to teach content and for students' to create artefacts. Some ideas are:

1. Of course there is a Prezi on using Prezi as a teaching tool.
2. Exploring images and diagrams using the zooming feature.
3. Students creating artefacts to explain how something works or a biography of their life.
4. Creating a wiki and linking in the students' Prezis so that they can comment on each others' Prezis.

It is important that when incorporating images, graphics, animations, audio and videos into Prezis that I encourage my  students to think about how they could best be used to make their message clear and easily understood.

Always I need to be aware of working in a legal, safe and ethical environment. Any images or recordings of people would need their  permission to be uploaded online. If using images or recordings of students I would need their parents' permission. Children should not be identified online, and any images uploaded that showed their faces should be restricted to secure online spaces only.

Pedagogy of teaching with Prezi

My teaching practice is teaching Technology and Mathematics to secondary school students. I think that this age group would love to exploit the features that Prezi has to offer. When teaching the Technology as a subject I can envisage asking students to use Prezi to explore the development of multimedia over the last 50 years and use Prezi to give examples. They could set it to a timeline. When teaching Mathematics I could ask the students to create animations and charts in Prezi to illustrate mathematical concepts. For teaching Mathematics I found an excellent presentation entitled Math is not linear. This presentation uses the features of Prezi to illustrate why it is not necessary to teach math in a linear progression - using the zooming feature to illustrate the main points. 

Prezi is a wonderful tool to that not only allows students to create interesting presentations but can also be used to justify, explain, illustrate, animate and collaborate. It allows students to provide the big picture for an overall understanding and then to use the zoom function to let them explore the detail. Wonderful tool to suit linear and global learners.