Russell Stannard finds Prezi to be a real alternative to PowerPoint.
PowerPoint is probably one of the most frequently used technologies in education. Most people use it, or something similar, when they give presentations and talks. It is quite common to see teachers using it in ELT classes, too. Of course, it is also great to get students to create their own PowerPoint presentations and then give them to groups or even to the whole class.
You may also have heard of Prezi. It is a genuine alternative to using PowerPoint and one that has been getting a lot of attention in the educational world. It works in a completely different way from PowerPoint, being based on the idea of brainstorming or laying out all your ideas and then connecting them. You create an ‘animation path’ that takes you through your ideas, linking them together – and this becomes your presentation. By working this way, you avoid the rather linear approach of PowerPoint. Prezi can take a lot of getting used to, and many PowerPoint users find it difficult to move from one product to the other. However, it does offer lots of possibilities and a genuinely different way of creating your presentations.
What you can do
Imagine you were going to make a presentation on the subject of human trafficking. You might want to make some important points, you might have an interesting video you want to show, you might have some images, too. You could lay all these items out on your ‘canvas’ in Prezi and then think about how you want to link them together. You could start with some opening key points, then go to each key point individually to add more detail, then go to a picture, then a video, and then even come back to the opening points and reiterate them. Once you have your plan, you can simply link the ideas together by creating an animation path. You can jump back to points made earlier and zoom in on individual points to show how they are linked to the broader picture. Though it is tricky to use at the start (you will find the videos mentioned at the end of this article a massive help), eventually it really starts to make sense.
The Prezi canvas
The way you develop a Prezi presentation (a prezi) sometimes makes it hard to visualise, especially if you create your own one from scratch. Most people think of the ‘slides’ on the left-hand side the same way they do the slides in PowerPoint. Actually, what you are seeing on the left-hand side is not slides, but the animation path. You have just one canvas and you move around the different objects on that canvas. You can access the whole canvas at the top of the screen on the left. So the presentation is put together by creating the path through the objects and choosing what you zoom into and focus on.
The next problem is ‘objects’ and ‘frames’. When you add an object onto the screen (using the Insert tab), it is simply an object, which you are adding to your canvas. So an object might be a picture or a video which you add to the canvas, but this does not affect the animation path. To add the object to the animation path, you need to click on ‘Edit path’ and then click on the object. Only then will it be part of the animation path and included in the presentation. However, frames don’t work like this. When you add a frame onto the screen (using the Frames & Arrows tab), it is also added to the animation path automatically. Once you get your head around these two concepts, you will start to understand how the tool works.
The Prezi templates
A good way to start with Prezi is to use one of the pre-prepared templates. These already have the animation path defined and so you simply add in the text, video, pictures and objects you want and it is ready. Prezi offers a range of templates to work with and some of them work really well. So, for example, if you want to focus on a central point and then talk about a related point and then come back to the central point, you could try using the ‘Cohesion’ template. Another nice one that works well with ‘for and against’ or balanced arguments is the template called ‘Balanced’.
The Prezi account
To use Prezi, you actually create an account online (the basic one is free) and then all your prezis are accessible from your account. You simple click on the prezi you want and then click on Present. You can then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move back and forth through your prezi. Prezis can also be downloaded to be used offline.
What your students can do
Prezi allows for collaboration and so you can have more than one person creating a prezi. This could be an interesting way of using the tool with your students. They can build presentations together in pairs or groups and can also do this remotely. Your students might like the idea of brainstorming their ideas and then linking them all together, and they might find that creating a presentation on Prezi is a more interesting way of presenting their ideas.
Prezi is a bit tricky at first, but once you get the hang of it, it has real potential.
I have made some help videos for using Prezi. You can find these at: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/prezi1/index.html www.teachertrainingvideos.com/prezi2/index.html
Russell Stannard is a Principal Lecturer in ICT at the University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches on the MA in ELT. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site of the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTon award, all for his popular website www.teachertrainingvideos.com.
This article first appeared in English Teaching professional, Issue 87, July 2013.
