Class presentations are a familiar part of high school courses for students. There are different applications to create these types of presentations, including Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Drive, but another option that some students choose is Prezi.com
“I wanted to spice up not only my experience with presentation, but the experience of my audience,” said sophomore Dakota Dykes. “I saw another student use it in class, and it sparked my interest.”
The main three founders called their new program, “Prezi,” after a shortened version of the Hungarian word for presentation.
Prezi was created in 2008 as a replacement for typical slideshow presentations. Instead, the site implements a zooming tool that focuses on small parts of a large picture as the user goes through the presentation.
“I first used it for a Spanish assignment because my brother did a really cool project with it that inspired me,” said sophomore Molly McDowell. “It takes a little bit longer to figure out the controls than some other kinds of slideshows, but once you know what you’re doing it’s just as easy as anything else, and the effects really enhance the final product.”
Prezi has many different features to offer its users in creating a presentation, such as the many different templates offered as a starting point as well as the option to customize their own. Another tool allows images to be rotated, enlarged, filtered, and edited to increase the desired effect. Users can enhance their work by adding these images, YouTube links, and PDFs into each frame.
These frames are one of Prezi’s signature elements, and are used like slides to take the viewers through the presentation. Frames can be several different shapes or even invisible, simply used as a placeholder for content to be inserted in the Prezi.
“I used it for a history project in eighth grade because my teacher recommended it and I wanted to try it out,” said freshman Hunter Manter. “It could do fancier things than I had seen on PowerPoint, like animations and putting your own art in as backgrounds.”
Some students, however, still prefer to stick to more familiar applications for their schoolwork.
“I used Prezi once in freshman year and didn’t like it at all,” said junior Austin Driver. “I prefer [to use] Google Drive for presentations. It’s what I’m used to, and if I can design good presentations there, then changing to Prezi isn’t worth it.”
Other presentation applications are not made obsolete by the use of Prezi, but it does serve as another option for those who want to try using something new for a class project.
“I never liked using the boring, slide presentations that everyone seems to use these days,” said Dykes. “Prezi is a new, exciting, and visually enticing kind of presentation that has really sparked my interest.”
