Prezi fresh!

Two weeks ago I looked at the benefit of PowerPoint slides for the classroom: quick and easy to create. However, PowerPoint has obvious disadvantages, not the least being that the medium of PowerPoint is on such constant rotation, the message itself is tainted. 

I argue that this alone is reason to scout around for other tools.

A colleague recently introduced me to Prezi when we had to put together a presentation. She is a tech wiz and had no idea there were people like me who had never seen a Prezi before, so there was no prior demo. I was decidedly unconvinced as we laboured over the creation of our presentation. The editing process was fiddly and it made no sequential sense to me.

Then she hit play.

See, PowerPoint is like a book, each slide loaded with text that gives way to the next visually identical slide. The trajectory is linear. But thinking just isn’t like that. Thinking is circular, it moves in and out of ideas and back again, it moves between the specific detail and the general or conceptual. And this is what Prezi does. It makes connections; it constructs knowledge.

As a tool for communication, Prezi has great possibilities. It is dynamic, intuitive and visually logical. It uses trajectory as a means of emphasizing the message. However, Prezi offers additional learning benefits for students when creating their own media presentations.

Unlike in PowerPoint where you can rapidly dump a mass of words and loosely group material in separate slides, Prezi forces you to make more complex editing decisions. The limited word capacity requires you to make decisions about what is important, what is the core, conceptual message. As well, the non-linear trajectory enables you to make interesting decisions about connections between concepts and what degree of emphasis you want to give various concepts.

A basic PowerPoint slide could be effective in getting younger students to describe concepts and to apply them to specific situations. A Prezi could enable older students to engage in genuine higher order thinking, to explore interrelated concepts in a more rigorous way.


An interesting lesson would be for students to create a presentation in PowerPoint and then transfer it into Prezi. This could be the basis for a class discussion around the different mediums and how many of the new media tools require different forms of reading, writing, viewing and even thinking.


(See also this site offering tips on creating a great Prezi.)