Play with Prezi

I went with the childhood obesity theme this week....   so here's my play with Prezi. 

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I analysed the tool using PMI:

Plus

• Very visual - I can see that it would appeal to 'digital native' students
• Lots of templates so easy to use (and easy for students to create).
• Thinking does not have to be linear - greater creativity and better flow of thinking allowed.
• Can embed pictures and YouTube clips and own documents.

Minus

• Hyperlinks are messy - can't highlight text and include hyperlink in background.  The whole weblink needs to be inserted as text.  
• A little bit hard to work outside the template (like add new think bubbles etc) ... but perhaps becomes easier with practice.
• Hard to navigate and format in edit mode (do you think I could make the ppt size any bigger?)
• Can't limit Prezi to private viewing only with free version.
• Only 500MB storage in free version - may be an issue if using large documents etc.
• Referencing seemed almost impossible with the format of the tool, unless you insert text boxes below each image and youtube clip etc, which would be messy and take away from the impact of the presentation.  Perhaps need to attach a document with all the references together.
• Powerpoint presentation loses interactive and animation ability when inserted into Prezi - is inserted into Prezi as a series of slides.

Interesting / implications

• I had never heard of Prezi before now, but there are 18 million + users .... where have I been hiding?  I'm assuming that alot of those 18 million users will be our students.
• Implications with online legality, safety and ethics as free version can't be saved as private viewing only.  Possibly need some monitoring for student work (and like all other online tools, educate students about online guidelines and safety).

I can see that Prezis would be prefered over Powerpoint for many students.  Because of the reduced capacity for text in a Prezi, I think it would result in a more interactive, interesting presentation from a student, as Powerpoint presentations often contain too much text and hence can be uninteractive and quite boring.  However, I think until Prezi improves it's usability (messy hyperlinks, hard to navigate, public viewing only etc) I don't think I will be rushing back to use Prezi in my teaching.  However, if students find it easy to use and prefer it over Powerpoint, I would be encouraging them to use it.  Just because I find a tool hard to navigate, does not mean I will limit my students.  It may be a good thing if they want to use it - it will force me to use it to become more proficient at it (and perhaps alot of my issues with the tool are because I am not proficient at using it).

As mentioned above, students who use Prezi need to follow ethical, safe and legal guidelines.  Students need to be aware that their Prezi will be open to all web users as there is no option to make it private.  Therefore, they need to ensure there is no inappropriate or malicious content or language, and that the images/videos they embed into the Prezi need to follow the same guidelines.  Students need to also ensure they reference the multimedia items they have used in their Prezi (even though the tool doesn't make it easy to insert referencing) so that they don't infringe copyright laws.


References

Images in Prezi sourced from http://feigenson.us/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/elevator.jpg, http://www.medimanage.com/Images/child-and-tv.jpg

YouTube clip in Prezi sourced from http://youtu.be/myxwCEGcBYc