Powerpoint vs. Prezi

And the winner is... Prezi.

I saw my first prezi presentation last spring during a talk that two of my dear friends were giving at our church. They were discussing their individual and joint spiritual journeys, and their talk was delightfully supported with a prezi. It reminds me of another friend of mine who was asked to speak at a Hickory Ted talk about two years ago. My friend was honored to have been asked to speak about the design and construction of her environmentally green house. This particular woman never does anything halfway, so before she even began to work on what she would say during her presentation, she did some research about how she should give her presentation. She told me she'd learned that when using powerpoint during a presentation, the point of the powerpoint wasn't to convey the main ideas of the speaker's topic but merely to serve as visual support during the talk. Of course, as anyone who's ever sat in a warm auditorium while a speaker read word for word from powerpoint slides would say, "No duh!" And yet, her comment intrigued me and mirrored what most of the criticisms from this week's reading have suggested. Too often, presenters rarely interact with the audience during a presentation, opting instead to read a presentation from the power point slides they have created. Coming back to the talk I heard at my church, not only did my friends really present a fresh and visually interesting presentation in their prezi, but they also know that people in the audience want to connect to a speaker, not sit while a speaker reads to them from a screen.

My own experience this past week with prezi mirrors that of my colleague, Dena Fulton, who wrote in a recent blog about how much fun it was to learn a new technology like prezi. While there were a few aspects of prezi that were not as user friendly as I would have liked, generally it was easy to pick up and fun to create. Unlike my friends from church, I found myself treating prezi much like I would a powerpoint, in that I was creating a presentation to be read by someone online rather than one I would present live to an audience. That being said, I did choose a topic for my prezi that reflects the information my college students are currently reading about, namely the various aspects of health and wellness. I used the opportunity to condense much of the information into a unique and visually interesting presentation, which I'll share with them on Monday morning. *Here it is:

*It is much better viewed at full screen, so be sure to maximize it.



A final, quick note on prezi. My oldest son, who is almost 10 and in the 4th grade, brought home a project on nutrition the other day. He had created a poster which was split into sections and had a variety of layers for including information. For example, one "tab" was labeled Fiber. Under it he asked and answered the question, "What is fiber?" He then had several other tabs that explained what foods it was found in, what systems in the body it aided, and finally, what the effects were of consuming too much or too little of it. My first thought when I looked at it: This would make a great prezi!