Prezzi

I have been experimenting with 'Prezzi' for a while now and whilst I am the first to admit that when I first used it I was unsure whether it was little more than a flashy presentational tool more suited to the bright spark in the office wanting to impress his peers, I am becoming more and more enamoured.

Prezzi is an online presentational tool, which is free if using the basic package. this allows you to produce presentations online and to download the presentations and show offline - this gets around the problem of the internet being unavailable whether from network failures or as may be the case in many schools / colleges blocked access.The basic package also gives you 100mb storage. For a fee there are more facilities open to you such as having the 'Prezzi' watermark removed and also maiking the pesentations private along with offline cretions with the most expensive licence, and of course you get much more storage.

Recently Prezzi has caught on to it's appeal for education and is now allowing a student / teacher licence which allows you

• Online creation
• Offline presentation
• Removal of watermark
• and the ability to make your presentations private or shared with selected individuals.

This last pointer has made the system more appealling to me. One of the drawbacks that I had in using the tool was that it made it difficult to share my presentations with my students for later reflection. Whilst there is a search tool present, it is not cery exacting, and you cannot search for authors. Being able to make presentations private would mean that providing all the students had an account would mean that the relevant presentations could be saved with relevant individuals on particular courses.

Prezzi is quite easy to use once you have had a little practice, I am still a novice, but each presentation is becoming slicker, my students seem to enjoy them and there is a strong argument for ringing the changes from an interest and motivational point of view. One of the key advantages in my mind is that the very nature of the application limits the amount of text that you can put on the screen at any one time. This forces you to think about what you need to say and keeps you on track with the key points you wish to expand. it is easy to attach external documents you may wish to refer to, ans embedding items such as videos is far less fiddly than for example PowerPoint. the presentation is made over a single screen and transitions exist in the form of 'paths' which zoom in on key areas. I can see how care needs to be taken with these as if there are two many too quickly then it is possible that some people may suffer motion sickness.

As with many applications it has its drawbacks and the key thing is to think about how you are going to apply your presentation and if it is the right tool for the job!! Further as with all new application there is always a novelty factor and it will be interesting to see how the application is developed to counteract this.

Classroom managment on Prezi