Pretty Pleased with Prezi

Prezi? My new presentation creator?

I love PowerPoint! I love using it for presentation purposes. I love using it to create worksheets or handouts for my students (it’s easier to format when I want to include an image). I even use it as my template creator for when I create templates for my students to use for writing projects (it’s easy for them to manipulate and move images and text boxes). When someone told me to check out the Web 2.0 tool Prezi as a presentation creator, I was hesitant. Why use something different when I like what I am using already? But I was feeling adventurous, so I checked things out and here is what I discovered!

Prezi is very easy to use. Once you create a free account you are able to design your own unique Prezi presentations, almost like little word movies and the best part is you can create, save, then sign out, and at a later time you can sign back into your account and edit your creation! Prezi will save your work for you! You can also download your Prezi presentation and save it to your own computer or flashdrive or cd. Prezi offers a variety of fonts, themes, layouts, and colors allowing your Prezi presentation to be unique!

How did I use it?
I created my first Prezi presentation to share with my students on their vocabulary words for a lesson they were learning. I used it as nothing more than a review of the words and definitions. I know this may not be the most exciting presentation, but it allowed me to practice using Prezi. My students were at first impressed with the uniqueness of the presentation and how they words moved and zoomed in and out, but they quickly became bored and no zooming in and out of words was going to help.

The Downside
I would love to have my students use Prezi to create their own presentations, but Prezi does require an email address to set up an account, and that is a policy my school has not fully set. So far now, I will continue to explore Prezi as a presentation option!

You can see my first Prezi presentation that I showed my students here: http://prezi.com/m1pkdq-iewwy/classical-roots-lesson-6/
Check out Prezi for yourself! http://prezi.com/