Just as an aside to my posts about online learning, I wanted to add my 2 cents worth to the prezi vs powerpoint debate. Obviously, there are many people who are sick to death of boring horrible PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes I think that if I see any more versions of that stock standard title and bullet points slide I might puke. However, I'm not ready to completely dismiss PowerPoint like these folk:http://prezi.com/wwmfvms6dno-/death-of-powerpoint-prezihelpcom/ or the Anti PowerPoint Party in Switzerland, a group who would love for us all to give up PowerPoint for good (OK, I'm exagerating! The 'leader' is just asking us to consider our use.): http://www.anti-powerpoint-party.com/en
Prezi is really exciting and a bit of a revelation the first time you see it. Prezi allows much better integration of pictures, organisational diagrams, and video than PowerPoint has ever allowed. Prezi looks clean and the fonts and options for formatting encourage that nice balance of clean lines and white space that appeal to us all.
I really enjoy showing students prezi for the first time. Their reactions are wonderful. I think using different techniques for different classes also shows students that your thinking about them and that you want to keep thing fresh. Here's my own go at presenting the week 1 class of my first year psychology class through Prezi: http://prezi.com/aptydeva0mev/welcome-to-psychology/
If you're a learning designer or curriculum consultant, feel free to borrow my prezi for "think pair share". You can find it here: http://prezi.com/gexbogc_ymt8/think-pair-share/
As much as I like Prezi, there are some advantages to keeping PowerPoint in your toolkit.
First, I don't own the professional version of Prezi, so uploading pictures and files can slow down my production time in Prezi. I also am required to generate notes from my students for every class. Prezi doesn't generate notes for your audience; at least, I haven't discovered a way to do it. Prezi also is a little frustrating when presented on different sized screens and via some projectors and I've found that Prezi takes a little longer to construct.
For me, PowerPoint is not just a presentation tool. PowerPoint also is useful for planning out websites and creating posters (just change the page settings to A0 or whaterver size you need). PowerPoint is a reasonable image editing tool and the 2010 version has some fantastic functions to create transperant space around your images. Tom Kuhlman is an absolute rock star of learning design and his posts are excellent tutorials about how to use PowerPoint and similar tools to their full potential. See Tom's PowerPoint blogs here http://learningppt.com/ and here http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/ Also, if you are willing to ditch the stock standard layouts in PowerPoint, I think you can make pretty great presentation.
I'd love to hear about your attempts with Prezi, what do you like about Prezi? What you don't like? Will you ever succumb to the APPP's cry and give up PowerPoint for good?
Prezi is really exciting and a bit of a revelation the first time you see it. Prezi allows much better integration of pictures, organisational diagrams, and video than PowerPoint has ever allowed. Prezi looks clean and the fonts and options for formatting encourage that nice balance of clean lines and white space that appeal to us all.
I really enjoy showing students prezi for the first time. Their reactions are wonderful. I think using different techniques for different classes also shows students that your thinking about them and that you want to keep thing fresh. Here's my own go at presenting the week 1 class of my first year psychology class through Prezi: http://prezi.com/aptydeva0mev/welcome-to-psychology/
As much as I like Prezi, there are some advantages to keeping PowerPoint in your toolkit.
First, I don't own the professional version of Prezi, so uploading pictures and files can slow down my production time in Prezi. I also am required to generate notes from my students for every class. Prezi doesn't generate notes for your audience; at least, I haven't discovered a way to do it. Prezi also is a little frustrating when presented on different sized screens and via some projectors and I've found that Prezi takes a little longer to construct.
For me, PowerPoint is not just a presentation tool. PowerPoint also is useful for planning out websites and creating posters (just change the page settings to A0 or whaterver size you need). PowerPoint is a reasonable image editing tool and the 2010 version has some fantastic functions to create transperant space around your images. Tom Kuhlman is an absolute rock star of learning design and his posts are excellent tutorials about how to use PowerPoint and similar tools to their full potential. See Tom's PowerPoint blogs here http://learningppt.com/ and here http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/ Also, if you are willing to ditch the stock standard layouts in PowerPoint, I think you can make pretty great presentation.
I'd love to hear about your attempts with Prezi, what do you like about Prezi? What you don't like? Will you ever succumb to the APPP's cry and give up PowerPoint for good?
I think Prezi presentations can be really fun, but I have attended a few that actually make me motion sick. If the presentations dashes around too much, it's really disorienting (and, for me, nauseating.) I think I'll stick with Powerpoint, at least for the time being.
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