Prezi is my favorite powerpoint alternative. It’s been like this for quite some time now and although I have covered and used other online alternatives to ppts before, I believe Prezi is fun and easy enough to learn to make it a perfect ice-breaker for educators interested in changing the format in which they deliver their content. It’s transitions are dynamic and breath-taking while its customizable backgrounds, colors and fonts can wrap content into a vibrant form.
Besides, Prezi also has an educator/student license that provides a lot of flexibility and an extended number of features so that higher education institutions can broadly adopt it as their “alternative” of choice.
These are mainly the reasons why I have chosen to cover Prezi for the Bahrain Polytechnic Tecki Breki session, an early breakfast workshop like session where staff are given an opportunity to show their peers “new teckie stuff”.
In order to highlight Prezi’s advantages for content organization and delivery we held the workshop into a lab and had the participants, mainly academic staff from all the departments of the Polytechnic, to sign up for the service and create their first Prezi.
The materials used for the session are embedded here: a prezi for the presentation and a screencast created with ScreenSteps to record the first steps to create an account and explaining the Prezi menu.
Just to recap here are some advantages of Prezi:
- hosted online
- browser based (can be accessed from any computer connected to the internet)
- save/print (hence share on other platforms or give away as handouts)
- embed (this can be done with websites, blogs but also with VLEs such as Moodle and Blackboard)
- collaboration (one can invite editors to a prezi)
- different degrees of access to data (public access, public collaboration, private)
- FREE
- mind map thinking (rather than linear as required by powerpoints)
- flexibility and easiness to move content around
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