Prezi for Libraries and Instruction
A few days ago I found out about a presentation tool called Prezi from my friend Becky who is doing some very cool things at the University of Dubuque in Iowa. She’s using Prezi as a tool to help with some of the dozens of research and information literacy classes that she teaches.
Unlike PowerPoint your ideas aren’t confined to a single slide. It’s visually appealing and uses movement and zooming to highlight points and convey ideas. Prezi also just recently began offering a free educational license that allows students and teachers to create private prezis for free. This tool could be great for use in the classroom to talk about things like narrowing your topic, keywords, or the research process.
Seriously, if you’re someone who does library instruction or presentations, check out Becky’s presentation on Narrowing a Topic. There are a lot of possibilities for this tool. (UPDATED: Becky’s presentations are marked for REUSE so if people want to use her structure and just change the text they can!)
Is anyone else using this tool? Are you using it for instruction or for something else?
I’ve used it for presentations in workshops but not for instruction yet. I’ve sold some faculty at my university on using it for their courses though.