Introduction of Prezi
A Web 2.0 Presentation Tool
Homepage Link of Prezi
Categories of Prezi
Description:
Innovative and creative way to create and share presentations without PowerPoint. This zooming presentation tool also offers collaboration features. You can upload existing PowerPoint presentations and tweak it or create your own with various images, text, audio, video and animation.
How do people like or not like Prezi?
Prezi is an online tool for creating presentations — but it's not just a Powerpoint clone, like the Zoho or Google offering. When you first create a Prezi, you're greeted with a blank canvas and a small toolbox. You can write text, insert images, and draw arrows. You can draw frames (visible or hidden) around bits of content, and then you can define a path from one frame to the next frame. That path is your presentation. It's like being able to draw your thoughts on a whiteboard, and then instructing a camera where to go and what to zoom into. It's a simple idea, but people love it. Here's why:
- It forces people to "shape" their presentation. A slide deck is always linear in form, with no obvious structure of ideas inside of it. Each of my Prezis has a structure, and each structure is different. The structure is visual, but it supports a conceptual structure.
- It makes it easy to go from brainstorming stage to presentation stage, all in the same tool. People can write a bunch of thoughts, insert some images, and easily move them around, cluster them, re-order them, etc. People can figure out the structure of their presentations by looking at what they have laid out, and seeing how they fit together.
- It works well for explaining concepts that make more sense with a diagram, because you can basically make your entire presentation be the diagram — and then you can just fly around that diagram, pointing out the flow and zooming into the important bits.
Prezi isn't perfect, of course. There are the small requests, like wanting higher quality images and a code style for embedded snippets, and there are also the big picture requests. People want to be able to link prezis inside of prezis, so that I can make "components" of presentations, and easily zoom from one to the other. Users want to be able to create multiple paths for a given prezi, so that they can skip over bits for some audiences, and emphasize them for others. And they would love if they could have one canvas that had every bit of possible content on a topic, and they could use that one canvas for 20 different presentations.
Generally, people just love the fact that somebody is thinking different about presentation tools. There are so many people out there that are giving presentations every day, so as a society, we owe it to ourselves to invest more thought into how we do presentations.
Prezi is re-thinking presentations. Wave is re-thinking communication. Prezi gives me a blank canvas that can turn into a presentation of any shape. Wave gives me a blank wave that can turn into a document or conversation of any structure. Both of them are unfinished, but both have a bright future, and even if they don't succeed, they're successfully challenging the traditions of today.
My Aspect of Prezi
CUIN 6320
University of Houston