Presi: Online presenting

Project Description: “Create an online presentation using Prezi. Your Prezi presentation must have at least 12 slides with images and a YouTube video. Upon completion of your assignment, please embed your Perzi presentation (Width and Height as 440 x 320) here.”

Overview: Prezi is awesome presentation software. It is probably one of the easiest, if not the easiest, presentation applications I have ever used. I have used powerpoint in the past, but I always had trouble balancing the text box in the slides or adding media. With Prezi, I did not have any of those problems. I also think Prezi looks better than powerpoint. Prezi is laid out as if your were “brainstorming” your presentation. However, where you would normally think of brainstorming as being a rough draft and needed to be re-written, the Prezi software puts the “brainstorm” format into final form for you. I found this style to be easier to create my presentation than the slide-by-slide linear format of powerpoint. I also found it very easy to load media into Prezi. To incorporate Youtube videos, all you have to do is copy and paste the URL into the text box. How could you make something any easier than that?

The Prezi I made for this class was also part of a presentation that I contributed to for work (teaching). I was tasked with presenting a chapter of a book to my staff members who had also read the book. Overall, Prezi was a great success for this task. I had no problem incorporating the data I needed from the chapter material or organizing it into a streamlined presentation. However, during the actual presentation to the faculty and staff, while I was pausing the Prezi to speak about the material, the screensaver on the computer I was using came on. When I deactivated the screensaver, the Prezi had stopped and reverted back to website view. I had to click “home” and zoom the Prezi back to the correct slide. In the future, I will definitely disable the screensaver when I use Prezi. Despite this set back in my presentation, the faculty and staff responded very well to the Prezi and I received a lot of compliments on my portion of the chapter presentations.

Also, because Prezi is so easy to use, is free, and is available online, I will recommend it to my students in the future. This will be a valuable tool for them to learn.