Prezi

Prezi is a little like a PowerPoint presentation...but super-charged and modern! The first time I showed a Prezi presentation in my classroom, my kids were 100% attentive for the entire time, and they eagerly asked "how did you do that?!" when the presentation was over. I can get 100% on board with an online tool that helps make a presentation more entertaining!

Prezi is an educational-use only website. Teachers and students can create a username and password to log into their account. From there, you're taking to a unique Prezi-creating screen. It's free to use the basic version.

Prezi is similar to PowerPoint in that you can set it up to scroll through various screens/images/phrases with the click of your right arrow key. However, if you zoom all the way out, Prezi appears to be a gigantic poster board. You cluster things as closely or as far apart as you want, and just set up the Prezi screen to zoom in and out of the images and text you've supplied. The user controls definitely take some getting used to, but they are pretty easy (mostly because there aren't very many of them. hah). Prezi has a pretty good tutorial, and if you play with this tool for just a little bit, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it!

I created one about William Shakespeare, and another about common terms my kids needed to know before reading their first Shakespeare play. I had a few reactions from kids who rarely pay attention, and had some students tell me "that looked cool" so maybe it was a good idea. :) Prezi isn't anything particularly shocking, but it's got a different look to it that creates some variety in the classroom. Maybe that's all we need to keep kids engaged: a little variety!

Ideally, I'd eventually like to have students creating their own Prezis. I'd like to get away from me being the sole presenter of the classroom and let the students be free to create and explore. I currently don't know a lot about student accounts through Prezi, but the website is easy to understand, so I bet it wouldn't be hard to figure out!

Obviously, Prezi is an information-presenting tool. So you could use it to present information to your students, or the students could use it as a culminating activity...whatever. Besides the obvious reports and presentations, I've seen several Prezis with the title "30 Things About Me." Apparently, some teacher made it an assignment to log on and design a Prezi with 30 details about yourself. (It was a first-of-the-year project.) I thought it was a great idea, because kids get used to using Prezi with an easy topic (what is easier to talk about than YOURSELF?), and they can get used to presenting info to the class with that easy topic. It's a way for everyone to show off his/her personality and creativity! I like it.

This link also has some interesting ways to use Prezi in the classroom.