Prezi

For the last four months, I have been teaching a bible study on Paul's book of Romans, and while teaching I gave an attempt at using a new style of presentation software called Prezi.  I was introduced to Prezi at the Digital Gospel Conference by Bill Johnson at the seminary while I was working for him and John in EdTech.  

 One of the biggest strengths of using Prezi is you are not limited to a storyboard presentation.  Instead the presenter is given a large blank space to develop then let loose.  In the presentation you can zoom in and zoom out at any time, which means I was able to embed notes into the text of the passage, and all i had to do is zoom in to reveal the notes.  This also means that a timeline could be hidden in the P of Paul, and other notes could be used aesthetically.

 

 Unfortunately, while this has great power, there is also an issue, it requires an internet connection to build the presentation, and while I have yet to have it tell me that the presentation is full, it gets choppy after a while if you keep adding content.  My original intent for this was to have one "board" for the entire book of Romans, but I quickly realized that this was not a practical hope.  Around the same time as this realization my computer started crashing every other time it was plugged into a projector, so the Prezi was put on the back-burner for more traditional presentation tools.  I really liked it as a tool, but the time needed to build the presentation and then the following computer issues were making this unusable. (Side note:  The computer issues appear to be a hardware and driver issues, not a Prezi issue.)

My brother-in-law has shown that it has been a great tool for teaching his college level music classes, so at least someone is getting good use out of this amazing tool.  Maybe when I get a new computer down the road I'll return to this again.