#Slideshare

Going beyond the PowerPoint: Prezi and Slideshare

~ hchui

As part of Task 17, I will reflect on the use of Prezi and Slideshare. Both offer another set of options to Microsoft’s PowerPoint – which is good news since nobody likes a monopoly growing bigger by each day.

I went through the motions of signing up for a free Prezi public account. Which kiasu Malaysian doesn’t love free stuff? I thought the sign-up page was rather flattering and most ‘un-conservative’. Every time I completed a field, some cheeky comment will appear (see the screen capture below). Playfulness is an attribute of the digitally literate. Most old-school teachers in this part of the world would frown at the informality.

prezi

Prezi offers a very eye-catching way of presenting content. Given the short-attention span of most Google-generation students, this is a cool way of getting a message across to them without causing them to drift into daydreams. There is far more action and engagement than the typical PowerPoint presentation. One thing that I like about prezi is its ‘non-linear’ format which brings more flexibility. A prezi can also be printed by first converting it into a pdf file.

Here is one prezi presentation that I like. I found many Economics teachers using this tool.

I also signed up for Slideshare. Like Prezi, it seems a more evolved form of PowerPoint. It reflects convergence of technologies – presentations are now a combination of static slides, multimedia and visual elements plus some networking feature, all run on steroids, harnessing all the creativity endowed upon the human species. It will impress many students who are visually- inclined! Here is an example of creativity

Before we let these tools bewitch us, it’s worth remembering that the main advantage of Prezi and/or Slideshare is to help capture/retain attention. If one is confronted with  students who are just not engaged with the world they live in, then no learning actually takes place – the presentations will merely be taken as entertainment. Moreover, one must not overlook the importance of good internet connection – something that I sometimes do not get here.