Adventures With Prezi

I've had a Prezi account for a few months now, with the intention of converting some of my Powerpoint presentations to Prezis, but I just haven't found time to do more than play around with some files and explore the Prezi workspace. The Digital Co-Lab project has given me a reason to sit down and finally get serious!

Before I get into the details of this particular project, I should mention that I am generally a "jump in and learn as I go" technology user. I found the Prezi workspace and controls to be pretty intuitive, but once I started playing with it and thinking about what I could potentially create, I decided to save myself some trial and error and research how others are achieving the effects I wanted. There's a wealth of information out there; a couple of good resources that I found are 10 Tips to Help Master Prezi by Drew Davis and Dan Steer's list of 28 Best Prezi Tips. Both of these sites provide some good technical tips (such as setting your screen resolution to 1024 x 768, as that is a common presentation resolution) as well as design tips (like trying to think like your audience as you lay out your presentation). Also, check out Paolo Tosolini's video on creating a cool background effect.

For this project, I started out by scanning images of the textbook pages I wanted to highlight. I used my iPad and the FasterScanHD app to do this. The resulting images are of decent quality, though not incredibly sharp. In the future I'll probably use a dedicated scanner for this type of project. Also, it was not until after importing all of the images as jpegs that I found Dan Steer's suggestion to import images as pdf's so as to preserve image resolution when zooming. Next time!

I actually started out with a more linear for my Prezi, but scrapped that because I wanted the presentation to emphasize the idea of previewing a textbook from the outside, in. The way that the magnifying glass theme zooms further and further in to each section better captures the idea of "going deeper" as you complete a textbook preview.

Once I decided on a theme and layout that would work for this presentation, putting it together went very quickly. The key technical piece that really helped me out was figuring out how to use invisible frames to zoom in on small subsections of larger frames. I also put the new animation tool to work in a few spots, though I generally try not to go overboard with animations and movement.

Now that I've got one done, I have several ideas for future projects...I'd like to do a few math concept Prezis. Stay tuned!