Learning Prezi

I took my own challenge and spent some of my holiday time learning a new technology tool: Prezi, a program for creating presentations. A few weeks ago I spent time looking at the website, watching the tutorials and also watching the "best of" Prezi. When I went back to it again, I found I had to watch the tutorials all over again. I know that the best way for me to learn is to apply what I'm learning to something I will really use. Since Richard and I will be presenting at PLA, I took our ppt and prezified it. One of my challenges with this approach was that turning a ppt into a Prezi is done by making the slides pdf's. This limits what I can do with the info on each slide. It was a good way to practice with the various editing features, but I found that it still was a pretty linear slide show because of how I started.

I struggled with this tool quite a bit and found that I wished for someone to tell me how to do and fix things. I kind of wished I could be in a classroom with a teacher so I could lean on the teacher to tell me how to do things I couldn't easily figure out myself. Learning alone online is harder for me. I really had to push myself to learn on my own. The tools are there, it just takes extra effort.

The other thing I learned is that to make our presentation really pop in Prezi, we will need to start over and think about what information needs to be grouped together visually in frames rather than on slides and what our overall image should be. I would share my Prezi with you but because of some mistakes I couldn't figure out how to fix, I think it would be more confusing than helpful.

I'll keep you posted on my progress. I'm trying not to lean on Richard to teach me how to be good at this!