Prezi in the Hizzouse

For my current position as an academic support service coordinator at a large public university, I have to give a lot of presentations.  I mean, a LOT of presentations.  To students, to parents, to other staff members.  I absolutely love it.  But they don't say its the #1 fear of all human beings for nothing.  None of us want to get up there and bore or lose our audience.  Have you ever inherited or been given a PowerPoint to present that was created by your predecessors and thought, "Good Gravy, how am I going to make THIS interesting"?  Well if you haven't met Prezi yet, allow me to introduce you to the answer to that there question.

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Prezi is a newish multimedia platform that will help you create more dynamic, engaging presentations and lessons.  The best part is that it is web-based for easy collaboration, at-home-grading, and allows for great accessibility without fear of losing your thumb drive or forgetting your email password.  Educators also are allowed a special bonus super awesome status that grants us extra bonusey things within Prezi... so there's that.

Yes, inheriting documents, presentations and curriculum can be painful if you are a perfectionist, type-A, OCD, formatting nazi, control-freak... but that wouldn't describe any teachers that I know out there.  Spending hours adding in animations and sound effects to your PowerPoint is simple smoke and mirrors my friends.  What you need is an engaging visual medium to actively draw in your audience and Prezi does this nicely.  Even Ted Talks experts use Prezi.

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Word to the wise:  Exercise caution when first working in this media though, you may actually get motion sick if you get a little carried away with the movements.  Also allow yourself some time to get over your rote PowerPoint techniques, Prezi takes a little getting used to and a lot of pre-planning in order to be effective.

As I mentioned, inheriting digital products can be a bit of a nightmare.  One of my pet projects in my current position has been to make the online resources available to our many college students more interactive and engaging.  Because I work in academic support, its my personal opinion that these support services should meet our students where they are physically and intellectually and to provide robust learning experiences for them.  I am fortunate to work at a very cutting edge university wherein products to allow for these kinds of robust experiences are readily available.  In order to share with you both an example of my use of Prezi for educational purposes as well as my roadmap for moving my department into the 21st century (from PDF read-only docs to online educational games!) I am including one of my presentations for your viewership here.  Some of it may make absolutely no sense to a university outsider but I hope it will provide you with a bit of insight into the Power of Prezi.