I have well over a hundred PowerPoint presentations that I have done for just about every section of every chapter in our current textbook. It has taken me about five years to get this many. Every year I add video clips as new ones become available on United Streaming and I modify the slides to make them more appealing. Even though I love PowerPoint, I have been getting a little bored with it. Next year we are getting a new textbook so all of my work will be obsolete. After viewing Prezi, I think I have found the new medium for my future presentations for the new textbook. Students will love how you can zoom in and out of videos and target points that you want to get across. I think that the general outlay of your presentation is so much more interesting that students will be even more engaged. It’s so different from PowerPoint. I love how easy the “zebra” is to operate. When I was first learning how to do PowerPoint, it took me so long to get a firm grasp on how to do a PowerPoint. I feel much more confident that this will be much easier especially with a tutorial that I can watch over and over. I am not sure if I am able to use this in the classroom as I have not heard of any other teacher using Prezi but I don’t see why not. As far as I can tell, Prezi is free for teachers- big bonus.
The other medium that I explored was Viddex. I loved how you could mix a video on one half of the screen with a script on the other half of the screen. To help get certain points across to the students or to emphasize certain points, I think that this would be extremely beneficial to any type of students. Any medium that keeps the students engaged and helps them to learn more effectively has my vote. I know that they can become really distracted when watching video clips. I think that by having multiple types of ways to display media can make the learning experience more fun for me as well as the students.
Our students are so used to multi-tasking that having the video and the text may really benefit some of them. I have seen a student having a verbal conversation with friends and a totally different conversation through texting with other friends. Do you feel that students are trully capable of taking in both the video and the text?
ReplyDeleteThanks for mentioning Viddex. That is not one of the tools that I chose to explore. I agree with you that it would be a great way to engage students and keep them focused. It seems like a good tech option. Was it user friendly? Can you add sound, such as narration to a video?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I too liked Prezi. My only concern is that it is unreliable according to what I read in this class and online. It makes me nervous that the only way to save it and store it is through their website. Call me old-fashioned, but I need a hard copy (USB file) to make me really trust a program. I do like the creativity that you get with Prezi and think that the students would love it. I just wish that it was more dependable.
Thanks for sharing!
I am interested in the Viddex idea of presenting information with a video. I am interested in how the presentation works out using Viddex. Keep me posted.
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