Prezi: Prezident of Prezentations

Marc Pedone
- ITA Tech Instructor -

The goal of this choice session was to give the students an opportunity to learn about some new presentation tools available.

We started with comparing Prezi to Microsoft PowerPoint by making a presentation of our favorite celebrities, first in PowerPoint and then challenging ourselves to make the same presentation in Prezi. By doing this, we were able to evaluate the pros and cons of each program.

After the students got a handle on Prezi, they were introduced to Prezi Meeting. This feature allows multiple people to collaborate on one presentation at one time from different computers connected to the internet. As a group, they planned out what they would present and how they would do it. On a white board, they planned the best way to present the city of Madison to someone else.

Madison, WI on Prezi

During the next session, students made two presentations. They first presented each other to the class for us to get to know each other a bit more and to familiarize ourselves once again with how to use the program.

The last challenge the students had was to present a place in the world to me. They would be separated in two different groups and use Prezi Meeting as a means to work on the collaborative project.

I feel like this session helped the students realize that there are always other options to almost every program. Sometimes those options are free and even better than the more popular choice. The students shouldn't feel afraid to find tools other than the ones ITA introduces to them. It also showed them how utilizing many tools (technology, speech, white boards, etc.) along with other people can help make very good use of time and resources. Often, students feel like they need to stick with one story, but really it's multiple stories, and collaborations that really inform us best!