Prezi

A friend at work recently introduced me to Prezi. The site has a nice educator package, so I thought that I'd give it a try. My Honors 9 Communications (English) class created digital poetry for their unit final, which allowed for a great last day of school! We munched on treats and watched our poetry unfold on the board. Lovely!

Anyway, back to the purpose of this entry: using Web 2.0 in the classroom. Prezi is an interactive presentation site. Much like PowerPoint and like software, the site allows you to enter text and images, then animate their entry onto the screen. Unlike the software programs, Prezi functions online and uses Flash to animate more visually-interactive presentations. As with many Web 2.0 tools, you can share content, both in editable and non-editable forms.

So, I made a Prezi in lieu of a handout for our project. Because prezis can be imbedded in blogs, I've included it below. My students then made their own and shared them to our Honors 9 group. I would love to share some of their creations, but I forgot to ask them to give me editing rights, so I can't remove their names... . Perhaps I'll get ambitious this summer and track down a few students about sharing theirs publicly.

The students were very responsive to this project, and maneuvered through the site fairly well. I did some direct instruction about how to use the site, but I only covered the basics. While this put the more tech-savy students at an advantage, I felt that the purpose of the project was to play with communicating a poetic message in a new medium, not mastering the medium itself. Overall, the students did a nice job of working with constructing visual- and movement-based meaning. Some dug in deeply, which lead to very rewarding content in the classroom. :-)

Overall, I think that Prezi has some great academic potential, although I don't feel that it is a "must use" tool. Besides this, it is quite fun!