Prezi

What Is Prezi? Prezi takes visual presentations well beyond power point. Here's a sample:

media type="custom" key="9374064"

Press the "forward" button--arrow head pointing to the right. This arrow advances the "slides."

Essentially, Prezi provides more ways for expressing ideas and their relationships with each other. It is also easy to incorporate images, videos, and sound in Prezi, so ideas can be expressed in different ways to help as many people as possible comprehend them.

If you have an educational email address (ends with .edu) then you can get a free better than basic account with Prezi. On the sign up sheet, give that email, and check any options that indicate that you are in an educational setting (K-12, higher ed), and you can gain access to that type of account. They will approve educational account within about an hour or two.

Working With Prezi Prezi's editing tools are in a different (more visual) form than most editing tools. They have an initial tutorial that shows the basics of the tools and how to use them. They also have a few more tutorials on their website and a users' forum. The documentation is not good but the user forum is handy. The main editing device appears in the upper left corner of your screen. It looks like circles. The big circle is for writing and editing as well as for getting around in the Prezi. The smaller circles have different functions. "Insert" allows you to insert Youtube videos in one option and regular files in another option. Currently other files that Prezi accepts include pdf, image files, and video files. If you want sound files such as mp3, then make a video with the sound file embedded.

Thinking in Prezi In addition to the options in a standard power point (combining text and image, embedding videos, etc.) Prezi offers a third dimension in its zoom function. You can put the most important ideas (in the above example, Teacher, Student, Log) "high" (not zoomed in) and can zoom in some for details about these ideas. You can create other levels by zooming in more and more. At each level, the type will appear a normal size. When you zoom out to your highest level, you will notice the detail levels become smaller and smaller, as if you were taking a glass elevator and watching the people below you. The advantage to this is that you can present the main ideas without people getting overwhelmed by the details. Then, as you go into details, you can always zoom out to remind people of the relationship of the details to the whole picture.