What is Prezi?

Prezi is a web-based application that allows users to work collaboratively to create a dynamic presentation. One of PC magazine’s top 100 websites and TIME’s top 50 websites, Prezi is adding “more than a million users a month” (Pack, 2014, p.38). Creating a Prezi is like creating a story for your students to read. In Shaadi Elswaifi’s article “On PowerPoints and Prezis”, he recommends thinking about “designing a movie” when creating a Prezi presentation. Instead of a typical PowerPoint where you go through slides linearly, the Prezi application allows you to present a bigger topic and then zoom in and out of different subtopics. This format is proven to make the content more memorable, which increases the retention of information (Prezi). It is also found to be “more organized, engaging, persuasive and effective than both PowerPoint and oral presentations” (Moulton et al., 2017, p. 31). With Prezi, you can present anywhere, online and offline. Prezi is also very user friendly with its clear instructions and how it offers multiple free Prezi templates. With Prezi the possibilities for creation are endless; you can show the life cycle of a salmon, the scale of the universe, or jazz up a math lesson!

 Connections to Multimedia Learning Principles

As collaboration principle 2 states “multimedia should stimulate the effective and efficient distribution of thoughts and cognitive processes while members carry out tasks” (Kirschner et al., 2005, p. 553). Prezi allows multiple people to be working on different tasks in order to allow the concept of a presentation to be constructed collaboratively. It allows educators to use the personalization principle noting “people learn better when the words of a multimedia presentation are in conversational style rather than formal style” (Mayer, 2014). The learning through Prezi can be personal and presented as a conversation with the class over reading directly from slides. Additionally, the guided discovery principle states that “People learn better when guidance is incorporated into discovery-based multimedia environments” (Mayer, 2014). Prezi supports students getting started and offers multiple free templates to choose from.

For more connections to the Multimedia Learning Principles (such as the modality principle, signaling principle and redundancy principle) check out Erin Fletcher’s original evaluation on Prezi on her blog.

Why Choose Prezi?

Prezi is a great application to create a presentation because it includes many multimedia principles that are essential for student engagement and will enhance the overall presentation. Prezi offers a free option which gives you 100MB of storage space; “enough for a few Prezi’s” (Prezi). With the free option, all of your Prezi’s will be public. Only by paying a monthly or yearly subscription fee will you be allowed to create private Prezi’s. There are student/teacher discounts offered for as low as US$3/month. This subscription allows you to use premium images and icons, have privacy controls, PDF export and even import PowerPoint slides into your Prezi (Prezi). 

While the classic PowerPoint uses a slide to slide linear model, “the major features of Prezi are an infinite canvas and a nonlinear presentation style” (Chou et al, p. 74). 

This being said, “the nonlinear presentation style precisely depicts the essence of elaboration theory (i.e. one of instructional design principles), which provides detailed guidance for instructional sequences” (p. 74). Students have even noted that Prezi is an effective learning tool that lets them dive deeper into their learning. There are even “innovative features emphasized in Prezi that may arouse the learning interests of students, leading them to pay additional attention to learning materials” (p. 82). 

Educators Experience With Prezi

As an educator, you can create your educator account and easily teach your students to create student accounts. You can also add a Prezi video to Microsoft Teams, in order to keep students up to date.

To dive deeper into an educator’s experience with Prezi, we decided to interview Erin Pomphery a TTOC with the Saanich School District. This interview done by Ariana Kelly was very insightful and gave us lots to think about when exploring Prezi further. Here is a link to the audio from that interview, as well as the link to the transcript.

Here is a video called “Teachers Using Prezi: Prezi Review”. It breaks-down what is beneficial about using Prezi as a teacher, and how it can be used in the classroom. This is a great video to highlight all of the amazing tools that you can access when using Prezi.

This page reviews and describes what Prezi is, as well as looking at the pro’s and con’s of Prezi for education purposes. Overall it is a great resource to look at because it is well put together, and includes real reviews from educators online.

Lastly, we included a teacher blog post about Prezi explaining how to create a video lesson using the application. Paul Tueske does a great job simplifying the information, so you understand and follow along as you work through his post. The blog post further illustrates how to prepare a Prezi video, and how to develop more customized templates. This illuminating blog post features numerous tutorial videos, showing educators how to record and share videos. Paul’s blog post is recommended for teachers who are providing remote learning opportunities for students during this uncertain time of COVID-19. We felt as though adding this blog post was very worthwhile at this time because it centers around how to create a Prezi to teach in the time of Covid-19. As Paul Tueske points out, Prezi is a great alternative to continue that connection with students in an online space.

Walk Through of Prezi 

This video shows a walkthrough of a completed Prezi, and how it can look including many means of multimedia principles.

To learn more about Prezi check out the blog that they have on their website.

References:

Chou, P., Chang, C., & Lu, P. (2015). Prezi versus PowerPoint: The effects of varied digital presentation tools on students’ learning performance. Computers & Education, 91, 73-82. https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/science/article/pii/S0360131515300695?via%3Dihub

Elswaifi, S.F. (2016, May 4). On powerpoints and prezis: a case for considering prezi as an alternate in medical education. Medical Science Educator, 26, 397-401.

Fletcher, E. (2020, June 24) Prezi Example. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXBehkOgZ_A

Kirschner, P. A., Kirschner, F., & Janssen, J., (2005). The collaboration principle in Multimedia Learning. In R. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 547-575). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mayer, R. E. (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. Introduction to Multimedia Learning. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1017/CBO9781139547369

Moulton, S. T., Selen Türkay, & Kosslyn, S. M. (2017). Does a presentation’s medium affect its message? PowerPoint, prezi, and oral presentations. PLoS One, 12(7), 1-39, doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1371/journal.pone.0178774 

Pack, T. (2014, April). Create eye-catching presentations with prezi. Information Today, 31(3), 38. 

Pricing plans and options. (n.d.). Prezi. Retrieved June 25, 2020 from https://prezi.com/upgrade/edu/next/. 

Rogowski, M. (2019, June). Prezi Classic Review. Common Sense Education. https://www.commonsense.org/education/website/prezi-classic 

Teachers Things That Work (2017, October 25) Teachers using Prezi: Prezi review. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPO7e2or9fo 

Teske, P. (n.d.). How to create a video lesson on Prezi Video and prepare for next year. Prezi Blog. Retrieved June 24, 2020 from https://blog.prezi.com/first-prezi-video-lesson/?fbclid=IwAR2DfzR_lJk8cq3xY87Js88PGq1W8DvlQmbrZBpGIU1yiDvTVcdvBlWjRK4 

The Presenter. (2016, December 13th) PowerPoint vs Prezi. Youtube. Retrieved June 25, 2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OU6gu8lcA4

The science of effective presentations. (n.d.). Prezi. Retrieved June 25, 2020, from https://prezi.com/the-science/?click_source=logged_element&page_location=footer_mobile&element_text=the_science

In our group, we looked at the apps “Flipgrid”, “Google Docs”, “Duolingo” and “Prezi”. After having a discussion on which app we wanted to research deeper, we chose Prezi. Prezi is an app that is not only accessible for teachers to use but also for students of all ages. It allows for a variety of ways to be both presented and created. It’s user friendly and allows for presentations to be 3D and interactive with the addition of pictures, words and videos. 

Although Flipgrid is a great classroom tool, we decided against it because Prezi has more interesting elements that we can focus on. Since the group evaluation of the selected multimedia app assignment makes up such a large component of our final grade, we wanted to ensure that we had enough content to cover for the evaluation. Another application we evaluated was Google Docs. As a whole, Google Docs is appealing because students can connect and collaborate on a platform with the ability for teachers to provide support throughout their learning. Although it’s a great application to use for students to collaborate with peers, it didn’t connect well with the multimedia principles without a set of criteria given by the teacher. For this reason, we chose Prezi because students are able to use this application more in-depth, and as a teacher, the design can connect many more principles than Google Docs.

The third Multimedia application we reviewed was Duolingo. As a whole, this application provides an engaging and interactive opportunity where information has been presented through a gamification method. However, we didn’t choose to spotlight it for our final evaluation of a Multimedia App. This platform is limiting because it’s solely for learning another language. It’s user-friendly but lacks the ability to allow users to interact with each other beyond a score. An educator can review statistics of how their students are doing but they cannot provide descriptive feedback via the application or share additional resources. A successful Multimedia App should touch upon most or all of the principles, however, Duolingo lacks prosperous cooperation of most of Multimedia Learning Principles. Prezi touches on several Multimedia Learning principles. Some of these principles include modality, redundancy, signalling and collaboration. These principles were noted on the first app review blog post but will be explored more in our final detailed review of Prezi next week.

Multimedia principles in relation to Google Docs are dependent on the criteria set up by the teacher prior to students accessing the platform. Without criteria the only multimedia principle that Google Docs promotes is collaboration. Google Docs fundamental appeal to educators and students alike, is the fact that it is focused on working with peers to create a document or resource. With a set of criteria given to the students by the teacher, it would incorporate many more multimedia principles. Adding more criteria will increase engagement with students, and allow for room to touch on various multimedia principles as well. Split-attention principle highlights the importance of having words and pictures integrated to help explain and support their point. If a teacher asks students to add images and captions to enhance the resource, as well as their learning on the topic it would create room for this principle to flourish. Another principle that could be added to strengthen student learning is the self-explanation principle. This principle is important for students to reflect on their learning, while also taking responsibility. The teacher can implement this principle by getting students to include a reflection of their learning on the topic at the bottom of the document after they have completed their resource. 

To discuss that overall evaluation in relation to multimedia learning using Google Docs, I will be using a rubric for eLearning from the University of Western Ontario. The rubric talks about functionality, accessibility, technical, mobile design, privacy, social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. I am going to focus on a couple particularly to highlight Google Docs advantages and disadvantages ass an application. First, I want to talk about what makes Google Docs so appealing to educators and students. Accessibility is a huge thing, the cost to use Google Docs is free, and as long as your have a computer, laptop, iPad, iPhone or any digital device that connects to wifi, you are set to sign up for an account. This can be done through email that will link up to your Google account, therefore giving you access to Google Docs. With that being said, creating the account is a bit of a challenge in relation to privacy and data sharing. Since the account needs to be linked to an email, it will require a third party application in order to create.

References:

From my personal experience with Google Docs, I find it very accessible for most if not all my peers to connect on the application. Navigating the application itself is straight forward, and looks and works similar to pages, or word. From the prospective of an instructor, I believe that Google Docs would be beneficial to keep students accountable, and have a space for students to collaborate from basically anywhere. It would also make it easy for an instructor to view progress, and make comments along the way to support students, as well as mark directly off of the platform.

Anstey, L., & Watson, G. (2018, September 18). A Rubric for Evaluating E-Learning Tools in Higher Education. Educause Review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/9/a-rubric-for-evaluating-e-learning-tools-in-higher-education