Prezi and me
by levdavidovic
I promised a blog post on prezi a while ago, so here it is, finally!
This blog isn’t intended as tutorial on how to make a prezi, they do a good job of that themsleves on the website. I discovered prezi in August and was an immediate convert. I use it for the moment to digitise my Junior Certificate History notes and to provide another communication method, along with the textbook (which admittedly I use less and less) , my notes on the whiteboard or photocopied, twitter (see here) and video clips.
Prezi allows me to highlight important points in a way that the dreaded powerpoint never did. I always found PP too clunky, and have been at far too many CPDs where the person at the top of the room just read from slide after slide after slide after zzzz… In contrast prezi let me project the topic on the whiteboard and talk around the text. That way everybody got the information, bu those who wanted a little more could listen and pick up an extra layer of the story, maybe some trivia, but always engaging the deeper learner. It also allows me to check on the writing going onto the page, especially for students who need help with accuracy.
Here’s one of the first ones I did. it’s about Ireland in 1900 and looking back on it now, it’s a bit busy but it got across the important introductory stuff about Nationalists and Unionists. At the same time I was trying to incorporate maps for my 2nd Year class and did this one on the Voyages of Exploration, it’s not finished but it was an early try at including maps and photos that would have broken up the class by going from whiteboard to textbook and back in previous years.
I’m much happpier with the next two on Home Rule In Ireland and Irish Nationalism, I was learning how to use the frame to zoom a little better and was experimenting with some text heavy slides and some visuals. I did another on the Reformation in which I wanted to show the students the faces of the people we were talking about as well as contrast the Catholic Church and Protestant Churches. Another on Post-WWI Europe was an attempt to again tie in pictures of the main players at Versailles but also include some contemporary cartoons on the settlement.
By the time I got to Hitler’s Germany, prezi had introduced multiple colours and fonts, and though I think this one is a bit too colourful, it allowed me to differentiate in class, telling students to only take notes on certain colours so that they either wouldn’t get bogged down in text or they would only have the information they needed. (There’s another on the Plantations of Ireland, but that’s a work in progress if you want you can watch as I draw up that one before Christmas.)
So that’s prezi and me, having had a projector installed and become fairly literate on the laptop it would have been a waste not to use them for something I hadn’t tried before. Now the girls come into the room asking one of two things: are we using our phones in class (twitter) or are we looking at slides?
Nice post on Prezi.
I feel like I’m battling upstream; my students don’t like Prezi. They prefer Powerpoint, which of course, is super easy… all you have to do is cut and paste, and you don’t have to think!
Prezi is better for the teacher and the students, everybody is thinking. PP drives me mad!
This is cool? It’s very snazzy looking. Does Jonesy know about it? Looks like it’s right up her street
Just starting to use prezi, definately prefer it over PP!!Took me awhile to get the hang of it(still getting the hang of it!),but I think its great!!Also students i’ve used it with have all loved it,much more interactive than PP!!
[...] 5. The use of prezi has changed the way I teach, less dictation, more action. Prezi and me [...]
We need to stop comparing Prezi and PowerPoint. They are different tools, and how they are used are in the hands of the user. You can do lots of imaginative things with each when you understand how to use the multiple features. I suggest that both students and teachers continue to use both and use them in powerful ways. I have seen awful work done with both tools as well as wonderful products created with each. Because they are different, we need to stop saying one is better than the other. As long as we do that, we become bad models in the classroom. Let’s stop this nonsense and encourage our students to use both in meaningful, productive, creative, and critical ways as multimedia tools.
Thanks Judy. I think it’s just that I’ve seen to too many presentations where the presenter hands out a hard copy of the slides and then just reads the same slides for an hour. Text heavy PP is the equivalent of the blackboard, gone, gone, gone.
I would be a devoted Prezi user if they allowed for italics. It’s very difficult to do legitimate work on it for academic presentation when you can’t italicize book titles, scientific names, or foreign words. My students love Prezi except for the point about italics. They know they can’t use it in their science courses because they can’t italicize scientific names without getting lowered grades. I will never understand why Prezi doesn’t allow users to italicize certain words.
I see your point Nels. I use colour to get around that problem; colour wasn’t available on prezi early on either, but it arrived. Italics might still follow.
A really helpful overview – thank you
Might I suggest a couple of options?
One is to use images on their own perhaps as a prompt for discussion without any text
Second to embed some you tube video clips – presumably there are many – which breaks up discussions and appeals again to visual learners
Thanks Geoff. Video is the next step you’re right and I’ve started using maps on their own to break away from text.