Prezi

 

  During our Tech Ed seminars, a few groups presented on how to use Prezi in education.  Prezi is free online presentation software.  Rather than advancing slides like in a powerpoint, the entire presentation is static  as a background and advancing along is done by changing the position and perspective of the viewer.  This means that there is a lot of zooming in and out and spinning.  It's pretty cool to see the different ways that people use it.
  Probably the most interesting part of it is the degree that you can zoom in.  One method, called nesting, is to put a picture deep within another picture so that when you zoom into its location, it wasn't visible before and it seems to appear out of nowhere.
  It's a fairly basic presentation program.  Probably the best way that I can think of to use it in the sciences is to give a bit of perspective on size comparison.  A basic thing to do would be to nest pictures of different size-scales along with things that are about that size next to them.  A really interesting way to do this might be to demonstrate the difference between gravitational force and magnetic force by showing the differences in distance that an common, 100 gram bar magnet would have to be away from 100 grams of iron to generate a pull of 1 Newton.  The actual comparison is difficult because of how different magnetic fields can be between equally massive objects, but you get the idea.

  Though it has a lot of bells and whistles, I am not too confident in the use I could make of it.  A point that was brought up in the presentation was that Prezi does have a fairly steep learning curve.  Additionally, it can be rather difficult to work with.  Despite the cool idea that you can zoom into different things, it appears that it is quite difficult to deviate from the already preset destinations on your grand picture.  This would be rather problematic if you wanted to use art in your lesson and wanted to get a close-up on a particular point of interest.

 

Do you think the optical illusion would go away if we zoomed in?

Conclusions:
  I'm not too confident that Prezi is much more useful that a basic PowerPoint.  Where it would really shine is being able to demonstrate a gradual change in scale which is something really weak in PowerPoint.  There are some problems with having to connect to the internet if you want to do a presentation, especially if your school wifi is really shoddy.  But you can fix that with monthly or yearly subscriptions!  Doesn't really excite me though.
  If you can find ways to use it to enhance the content, more power to you.  It's not really my cup of tea.