Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Thing #11 - Presentation Tools

PREZI

Prezi is a useful tool for developing engaging presentations. It is easy to use and provides an alternative method of presenting material to students. I developed the Prezi presentation below to teach my science students about the life cycle of a star. Click on the screen shot or the URL below it to view my Prezi presentation.



Prezi can be compared to PowerPoint as a presentation tool. There are many similarities in the way that you can quickly display a variety of content to your audience. Text, pictures, and videos can be easily inserted into your presentation just as you might do if you were putting together a PowerPoint presentation. Prezi also offers a variety of themes or backgrounds in a similar way as does PowerPoint. Preze and PowerPoint are very different from each other, however, in the overall structure of the presentation. Unlike PowerPoint's use of individual slides, in Prezi all of your work is developed and displayed on one large canvas. The presenter then moves around in different areas of the canvas during a presentation. The presenter is also able to zoom in to focus on a specific items or they can zoom out to give their audience a unified view of the entire presentation.

The way that I could use Prezi in the classroom is in one of two ways. In the first place, I could use it as another engaging way to present content to my students. The presentation shown above demonstrates how I could use Prezi to teach my students new material. I could also use Prezi as a way of having my students demonstrate to me their knowledge on a particular topic. For example, my world history students are currently preparing speeches on a topic related to the Great War. Prezi would provide an engaging way for them to include pictures or other visual aids along with their information.


ZoomIt.exe
Below are two screen shots of a song that I sing with my 7th grade Bible students while studying the lives of Felix and King Agrippa in the book of Acts. The first screen shot is not zoomed in while the one below it was taken after I had used the Zoom-It tool. ZoomIt.exe is a very helpful little tool for quickly enlarging any portion on your screen. While going through any presentation, Zoom-It allows me to quickly enlarge items on the screen or underline and circle things that I want students to focus on. This tool will be very helpful for students who have difficulty seeing and it will be a useful way of directing students to focus on specific items on the screen.







Content Standards:

Aligned to NETS-T: 1.b, 1.d, 2.a, 2.b, 2.c, 3.a, 3.b, 3.c, 3.d, 4.b, 4.d, 5.a, 5.c

Connections to Marzano Strategies: nonlinguistic representations, graphic organizers, note taking, and setting goals/objectives

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