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.

The Lazy Teacher False Dichotomy

Are we doing what is best for our students, or are we doing what is most convenient for us?

This question was recently raised by Scott McLeod at the blog Dangerously Irrelevant (side bar, I had to look up the meaning of the blog title and was interested at the response:   Our intelligence tends to produce technological and social change at a rate faster than our institutions and emotions can cope with. . . . We therefore find ourselves continually trying to accommodate new realities within inappropriate existing institutions, and trying to think about those new realities in traditional but sometimes dangerously irrelevant terms. (War: The Lethal Custom, p. 441). 

I can't say that I was surprised by either the question or many of the responses.

Why blame the teachers?  That is always the easiest path and interestingly one typically taken by the parents and the politicians; the two groups that rarely get examined yet have an equal stake in our student success.  I haven't met a teacher yet who goes into the job for the easy paycheck and yet, we are constantly arguing over tenure for those horrid old ninnies we can't get out of the schools and pay for performance testing to weed out the slackers.  This kind of questioning feels like education's answer to reality television.  It has little to do with real student outcomes but is so distracting that we seem to forget to focus on the real issues. 

They dont have enough at their disposal, they aren't paid well, they are at times ill-supported, they have tough goals yet we seem to hold only them up to the light.  Why not consider the students and who they are when they come to the teachers.

An interesting video from Kansas State begins that conversation, it is called A Vision of Students Today and you may have seen it already.  If not, it is worth a few minutes.  This video, along with another one, called Iowa, Did You Know? both examine what kinds students and life situations these students are facing these days. 

How can we really know if we are doing what is best for our students if we do not know who they are and attempt to meet them within their comfort zone?  How are we preparing them to be competitive and to move society forward if we are always meeting our students in their comfort zone?

Our students crave challenges and yes, some teachers do not create those environements for them.  I would like to think that is more due to a stringency of expectations from policy makers and administrators than it is from lazy teachers.  I also think our teachers' hands can be very tied to create robust learning environments when they are presented with ill-fed, ill-mannered, ill-prepared students.  Whose fault is it that they come to schools this way and why should the onus lie with the teacher to be their savior?