Prezi is a free online presentation tool that allows you to create and share dynamic presentations. Without slides and bullet points, you are able to explore relationships among ideas through movement, allowing the form of your presentation to support its content. According to Dr. Gideon Burton, “It’s not just a presentation tool, it’s a thinking and discovering tool.”
Prezi is a free-of-charge online presentation tool that allows you to create and share dynamic presentations and access them anywhere you have an Internet connection.
The major difference between Prezi and Powerpoint is that Prezi is not slide based. You create presentations on a canvas to which you can add content anywhere. After adding content, you can designate paths that the presentation will follow. Without slides and bullet points, you are free to explore relationships among ideas through movement, allowing the form of your presentation to support its content.
Dr. Gideon Burton of the English department uses Prezi for many of his class presentations. According to Dr. Burton, Prezi is not just about making engaging presentations: “As a lecture vehicle, it’s really good because it helps me arrange my thinking. . . . It’s not just a presentation tool, it’s a thinking and discovering tool. . . . It requires you to think through things spatially.”
In addition to encouraging deeper thinking, the tool’s flexibility also facilitates class discussion. Dr. Burton explains, “Sometimes I’ll put in additional detail . . . based on class discussion.”
Another powerful feature of the tool is the ability to share/collaborate. All the presentations you create on Prezi are stored online, and you can choose to make them publicly available. Dr. Burton points out that while “most presentations stay on the flash drive or hard drive, [Prezi ] allows you to socialize your knowledge and collaborate. . . . You can make content public and look at what other people have done.”
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