Prezi Review

Recently I found a wonderful list of Web 2.0 tools on Pinterest, and I thought that it would be cool to take a look at some of them, and review them in regards to how they can be helpful in a middle school or high school history/social studies classroom. I'm going to try to post a new one every Friday, so keep an eye out! The first Web 2.0 tool I'm going to share with you is Prezi. Prezi is like a PowerPoint presentation, but it's different, I really don't know how to explain it. You'll find a video of a Prezi I created on Jane Grey, the Nine Days' Queen of England. This was a presentation I made just to get used to Prezi, so it isn't anything really fancy. When I first started using Prezi, it was very confusing, and it can take a lot of work to make a presentation. If you like to print out your PowerPoints for students to take notes on, then this definitely isn't for you. You cannot print Prezis out for students to use, so keep that in mind. All of the movement, however, can be engaging, so students may pay attention more. What's nice about Prezi now is all of the "slides" are organized on a sidebar, like PowerPoint. This is a new feature. Before, it was very hard to organize the presentation, but that isn't the case now. I would definitely encourage you to have your students explore Prezi for classroom presentations, but just keep in mind how much more work it can be for a presentation. This should only be recommended to students who have a firm grasp of PowerPoint already and are ready to move on to something else. Check it out though, it is definitely worth your time. Please excuse the quality of the video, Prezi is not as shaky as the video, that is just the recording program I used.