I already brought up Prezi a couple of times before, but since I feel many people are not familiar with it, at least as compared to, say, PowerPoint, I wanted to dedicate some posts to this topic. It is especially high time, because, you may have heard, Prezi made a deal with the US government, pushing the cloud based software to American schools. As the first post of this series, let me compare and contrast it with the rival presentation tool, PowerPoint.
Prezi is a tool for presentations, just like the above mentioned MS software, but it is quite different. Contrary to PPT, it is dynamic and spatial, not static and linear. Prezi has less limitations and restrictions, offering an unlimited canvas as a starting point, with which you do (almost) whatever you want to. PowerPoint, however, operates with slides, samples, and fixed constructions. Both have disadvantages, of course. If you don't have ideas, because you are a beginner or lack time, you will be lost in the infinite space of Prezi. Nevertheless, if you want to present visual structures and complex relationships, you will feel the world of PowerPoint like a cage. Lately, I find Prezi more and more inevitable for my work, may that be creative, academic, or educational.
Prezi is a tool for presentations, just like the above mentioned MS software, but it is quite different. Contrary to PPT, it is dynamic and spatial, not static and linear. Prezi has less limitations and restrictions, offering an unlimited canvas as a starting point, with which you do (almost) whatever you want to. PowerPoint, however, operates with slides, samples, and fixed constructions. Both have disadvantages, of course. If you don't have ideas, because you are a beginner or lack time, you will be lost in the infinite space of Prezi. Nevertheless, if you want to present visual structures and complex relationships, you will feel the world of PowerPoint like a cage. Lately, I find Prezi more and more inevitable for my work, may that be creative, academic, or educational.
At the same time, we can witness a growing trend that using Prezi is cool. It is rare, however, that presenters use it in an effective way. If it is not the zooming function that is misused, then it is its very essence that is misunderstood. Now let me point out one way of mistreating this wonderful but not easy tool.
Many people get scared when they realize how much more time it takes to put together a good Prezi than making nice PPT slides (in fact, good visuals take a lot of time, whatever you make them with). So, what they do is that they just copy their PowerPoint slides into Prezi (as there is such an option in Prezi). Or, if not that, they use Prezi completely as if it was PowerPoint. In the end, you have 10-15 slides on the infinite canvas. Presentational suicide.
Here is a prezi I made when I wanted to show a group how not to use it. The original presentation was a relatively nice PPT. The prezi just sucks.
After the don't-s, next time we'll take a look at the do-s of making a prezi.
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