As any of you who have heard me speak or read my posts know, I’m currently going through a “crisis of faith” regarding PowerPoint.
Don’t get me wrong, I still use is regularly and I know that it ultimately will have a place in my toolbox, However, I worry that PP has become a Trojan Horse that never opens up. It was a wonderful way to hook teachers and teach them to become comfortable with their classroom technology. It was easy and only a small shift from what they have been doing for years. In the early years it was also a great attention grabber for students. I believed and hoped that as people became more comfortable with the platform, new uses and paradigms for instruction would emerge.
Well, if that’s happening, I’m not seeing it. Rather it appears that we (and I include myself in this as just as guilty of non-innovation) are sitting on a PowerPoint Plateau (going to do something with that title in the future). Even students have caught on with audible sighs as they see the beginning of a new set of slides that have to be copied into their notebooks. I heard a teacher say “OK, has everyone finished copying from this slide before I go on…” and I knew that the PowerPoint innovation balloon was filled with lead.
In the midst of my despair I was reading a list (which I can’t find at the moment, but if I do I’ll link it) of tools for teachers and I discovered prezi.com. I spent an afternoon experimenting and I think that I may have found a multi-use tool that can break some of the PowerPoint malaise and help us to re-examine classroom presentations.
To fully understand the program I suggest that you go to the site and look at samples which are more effective than words, but in short, Prezi uses a single page rather than discrete screens. Navigation moves from place to place within the page instead of following the direct outline. The program encourages you to use space, size, and format to build relationships between the various element of the talk.
Prezi is free (with limitations of storage space and a small watermark in the corner of the presentations) or subscription based. Presentations can be run on the web or downloaded and run in a flash format locally. The Prezi page can have a preset order or can be navigated by mouse (a great solution to the “prestacked” determinism of PowerPoint).
Now could we fall into the same trap down the road, perhaps, but I am enjoying the challenge of losing my PowerPoint bearings and rethinking my talks as I move some into the new platform.
This may be a platform that could do that rare feat, encourage a new paradigm.