To Prezi or not to Prezi

One of the biggest issues I run into with technology integration is the overabundant use of PowerPoint. Now my students know that PowerPoint is never an acceptable use of technology in my classroom (even with my PowerPoint Zen approach - I just don't go there anymore), but I find that many want to sneak a Prezi into their presentations. Now, to me a bad PowerPoint just makes a bad Prezi and I have issues with some of the "motion sickness" I get with a Prezi. So to be honest I just stopped using Prezi's for awhile. However, recently I gave two presentations that really lent themselves to the tool and they were better presentations because I used Prezi.

Millenials

I gave a presentation on Millenials to a small group of graduate students at the Design School on campus. They wanted to know a bit about the characteristics an traits of the Millenial generation. I found that when I was doing research for this topic I used a basic Spiderweb brainstorming tool. (see photo).
I immediately realized that this looked like a Prezi and that having it in a Prezi format would really help my presentation.

NMC Horizon Report 2013

Every year the New Media Consortium publishes a report on current trends in Higher Education. They look at technological trends at universities across the globe and do a great job of providing an outlook of what to expect in coming years. Every year I present this report to a group of Higher Education graduate students and what technology they can expect to see when they graduate. In the past I have always used Prezi for these presentations because Prezi integrates with YouTube so well. However, this time I actually found a template that fit the idea of forecasting the future of technology, i.e. what is on the Horizon for the next few years.



All in all I'm happy that I gave Prezi another try, but I still feel that the technology has to to fit your goals for the presentation, not the other way around

BTW: To get a Prezi to embed in Blogger you need to look in your embed code and add an s after your http in ourder for it to embed correctly!