Screenshot of part of the Prezi
My last post ended in somewhat of a challenge to myself: to use my love of playing with new technologies to experiment a little with the format of my teaching. I’ve therefore been trying out Prezi, the “zooming presentation tool”, as a way of presenting a teaching session I’ve been working on.
It’s still very much a work in progress, which is why I’ve gone with a screenshot rather than a link to the Prezi itself! However, I’m quite happy with how it’s going.
Because Prezi is a big canvas you can move around, zooming in and out, it acts as a mindmap of the stuff I want to cover in my session, and has encouraged me to think about how different aspects of the teaching link together, and how to make a narrative out of them. This has helped me develop the session, and hopefully should make it more coherent.
Another benefit is that I can use this mindmap as an archive of the presentation and the resources I cover, allowing students to retrace my actions, and acting as a tangible reminder of how I interpreted the resources. As well, of course, as mundanely linking to the resources I covered!
However, now I’ve arranged the Prezi as I want I’m starting to think that I could take the information back into a Powerpoint presentation, using other cues to indicate when a concept is a key idea, and when its more of an aside – which I’m currently using zoom to indicate. The zooming mechanism has acted as a useful tool for making me distinguish between key points, the meat of the presentation, and hints and tips, but it isn’t the only way I could present these different types of information now I have identified them.
I suspect the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and I won’t really decide what I think of Prezi until after I’ve used it in a session! Furthermore, the educational technologist in me knows that even if it is a success, it may just be the novelty of the tool catching students’ attention and not its inherent usefulness as a way of displaying information and ideas. However, the new teacher in me isn’t above using a little bit of novelty in an attempt to help students learn! That said, I will post the Prezi here after I’ve used it in my teaching, and see what conclusions I can draw on its effectiveness.
