Meet Prezi

Learning to create new material using Prezi was probably the most valuable experience I had in this course. I spent quite a bit of time learning how to use Prezi and my first attempt was not completely successful (I missed a crucial step which made the presentation move from one slide to another). However, it opened up an entirely new world of presentation possibilities to me that I wasn't aware of and I went searching online for other tools that would be equally as useful in my classes. I did have the opportunity to practice the prezi again the following week and I found it to be a much quicker process than the first try!

I decided to create a Prezi about the major project for one of the courses I teach. The material that I covered represented the types of questions that students often ask about how to complete the project so I thought that having a presentation in one spot that they could refer to on their own would encourage them to take responsibility for their own learning. The Prezi is a tool that I think works well with my teaching style because I tend to only use key points on powerpoint slides that bring students back to what they have read in preparation for a class. I also really like the ability to embed a video into the presentation and add graphics and color that would appeal to my students. I would stay away from Prezi though if I was trying to get alot of information across to students because of the flipping around, zooming in and out, that is a part of Prezi. I think that students might find that too distracting if there was a lot of information that they needed to gather from the presentation. In an online course I would likely use Prezi as a teaching tool, to introduce key concepts to students about what will be covered in a chapter or module, as well as having students make their own Prezi as a tool for presenting research projects that they may complete throughout the course. I think that the amount of time it takes to learn how to use Prezi is adequate for a student presentation, assuming they have not used it at all in previous courses.

My Prezi is called The Green Business Proposal. You can see the prezi here.