Prezi

I’ve spent an hour or so this afternoon playing with a new website called Prezi. I first saw the site mentioned on Mark Warners blog, and I signed up for the beta. This morning I got my Beta invite.

Prezi provides a very different way of producing presentations and maybe can change the way we think about presentations.

Rather than working on separate slides, you add different elements to your page. At the moment you can add text and images and also drop videos and pdf files onto the page. You can surround these elements with a frame or leave them as they are.

It takes a while to get used to the user interface, and it’s well worth watching the introductory videos first. But once you get the hang of it, it’s quite intuitive to drop items, rotate them, scale them and move them around.

Once the items are on the page you can link them up into a path using the path tool. When you view an item full screen you can then move forwards and backwards along the path to the next item. Alternatively you can just zoom in and out and select different items in any order. Great for non-linear presentations where you just have slides which can be viewed in any order.

I’ve had a quick play with Prezi just to get my head around how to make it work. You can view my sample presentation here: http://prezi.com/9991/

If you like the look of Prezi, you might be able to get on the Beta test. Contact details are on the site and explain you are in education. Either that or wait until the site goes live, whenever that may be. You might also like to take a look at the Prezi blog which explains more about the site.

Related posts:

1. Prezi announce Educational License
2. 8 Great Online Presentation Tools