We had a fabulous presentation on October 24th by elementary teacher Heather McFadden about effective use of Prezi in the classroom. While we were riddled with technical issues (sometimes it seems like anything that could go wrong, does go wrong!), it was still an excellent session for us to listen, share, and learn with each other.
To listen to the recording of this session, click here. If you are listening to the recording, please know that we had a few “technical” moments at the beginning of this session, you might want to go ahead and fast forward to minute eighteen.
Heather gave us some awesome tips about good presentations regardless of the tool being used. She reminded us to keep it simple and concrete but to also throw in some unexpected elements and appeal to emotions. She shared how one of her students favorite presentations was on light and reflection because she uses an image of a giraffe looking in a mirror!
We then checked out a sample Prezi that Heather has used with her class. It was a brilliant example because she really maximized Prezi’s ability to zoom in and out to make the concept of molecules more concrete. To check it out, click here.
It was great to then have everyone set up a Prezi account and collaborate on a document together. It was fun to try this out with everyone coming to it with different technology skills and levels of comfort. This was exactly what TLP-C was designed to do – let us all experiment and collaborate together! Thank you to Heather for leading us bravely down this path.
If you haven’t tried Prezi yet, accounts are free and there are lots of examples posted by teachers and students on all kinds of subjects. Participants at TLP-C shared that they make their own presentations for introducing new topics but that they also let students make their own presentations. And, as Heather said, the students are light years ahead of us and as long as we supervise the content, they will make the presentation engaging and visually powerful!
The information about prezis that we learned from the latest TLP-C session was very helpful and easy to implement in the classroom. I have seen prezis before but have never used them myself. During grad school, one of our professors preferred to use this particular presentation format to make the information we received feel more interesting. After getting the chance to set up an account and “play around’ with the website, I created a Simple Machines prezi to use with my third grade students. It did take some time to get the format how I wanted it but it came out really nicely in the end. The students really enjoyed the flow of presentation and how it easily incorporated videos. Here is the presentation I created: http://prezi.com/csftyvjuhlxc/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share. I really had fun with this resource and I know that I will use it again in the future.
That is great Amanda! We love hearing that you used something you learned in TLP-C in the classroom! Yea!
Amanda, love the simple machines Prezi, good explanation of the concept. The video at the.nd is hilarious
I was not familiar with Prezi before this presentation, but I am really excited to try and experiment a little more with it. I can see using it during writing instruction to help organize a persuasive essay and focus on notes to include in each paragraph.