Prezi

This week’s post is about Prezi, a free, cloud-based, non-linear presentation tool. I’m Dustin, a graduate student in French, and I’ll be writing about my experience using Prezi.

Prezi’s basic workspace is its 2.5D canvas—a visual map for sharing and exploring texts, images, videos, and other presentation media. The Zooming User Interface (ZUI) allows users to navigate their canvas by panning and zooming. Users can structure their presentations with a pre-set path, but diverge from that path and explore other parts of the canvas when it might be productive. They can also forgo a pre-set path entirely and instead explore the map according to the interests of the audience. Since Prezi is cloud-based, users can access and present their Prezis from any computer with an Internet browser and Adobe Flash. They can also share and simultaneously edit their Prezis with their audience. The best part is that Prezi is free for those of us with .edu email addresses!

Prezi works great for visualizing systems, diagrams, networks, maps, data, narratives, and other complex thoughts. I used Prezi for the first time Monday in French 255/Film 259, an undergraduate seminar on French cinema. My Prezi focused on Italian Neorealism, a postwar cinematic movement influential throughout Europe, and on a prime example of Neorealism, Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Theives) (1948) in particular.

We started by looking at texts, images, and clips from Ladri di biciclette. In the screen shot above, most of the media appears to be very small, but Prezi’s zoom function allowed me to zoom into each image that the class wanted to discuss. As we panned across the map, we analyzed the texts, images, and clips, noted key stylistic characteristics, and suggested interpretations. Depending on the interests of my students, I zoomed into certain bits of media and passed over others. Once we had finished discussing the film, we zoomed out and saw how the film fit into the cinematographic movement (see below). The key Italian Neorealist directors and their films, as well as the basic characteristics of many Neorealist films helped to contextualize Ladri di biciclette. Since Prezi’s canvas is infinite, I can continue to add to it throughout the semester as my class traces the history of French and European cinema. I can also have my students add their own research to it.

Why, you might ask, should I use Prezi instead of PowerPoint? Prezi allows learners to see the big picture. Guiding concepts and relationships are represented visually, as central features of the canvas, whereas in PowerPoint they are just part of another slide. This visual/spatial representation also speaks to visual learners, who tend to learn well with maps and diagrams. Prezi also allows for a student-led classroom. Teachers can upload a bank of resources to their Prezis before class, and take cues from their students about which things they would like to discuss. Teachers can also have students upload resources to the Prezi before class to prepare for discussion. If you don’t get a chance to discuss everything, students can access the Prezi after class. Lastly, Prezi is easy to use and it’s free. Embedding Google images or YouTube videos is very simple. Printing doesn’t work well on Prezi, but teachers can save paper by giving their students a link to their Prezi instead.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself! Your students will be impressed.

http://prezi.com/explore/education/