Louise Stansfield our resident communications expert and lecturer has been showing students an alternative to PowerPoint presentations called Prezi.
“Prezi is an entirely Flash-based app that lets you break away from the slide-by-slide approach of most presentations. Instead, it allows you to create non-linear presentations where you can zoom in and out of a visual map containing words, links, images, videos, etc.” Tech Crunch
Here is a video on Prezi to see how it works, it would be unfair not to make a comparison to the standard PowerPoint’s so below is a PowerPoint presentation from a previous MarketingTalks seminar placed in Slideshare, a presentation website.
Prezi has a free option for use but with limited options while it also has a student/teacher license which has many of the extra option except for the work offline option and 500mb free space. The Edu pro price is $59 a year.
Metropolia Business School could look at the option of buying a single license for students and staff if it was the case that Prezi would be used. However is it a good presentation tool? What do you think?
John Greene Marketing Lecturer had this to say: “Anything that moves presentation away from too much text and bullet points is a good thing. Prezi works nicely when zooming in and out of documents and images, however I am not fully convinced that Prezi offers a logical layout that is easy to follow for the audience particularly if they miss the presentation and see only the Prezi presentation on the topic.”
A number of students have been trying out Prezi and we hope to include their opinions here.
Please Fill in our poll at the bottom of this post with your view of Prezi.
Please add your comments to this blog post.
Metropolia Business School Blog 
Prezi is awesome tool when presentations are done right. No matter what tool you use, you have to keep your material simple as well as have only relevant information in your presentation. Everyone knows the Death by Powerpoint effect, but when we all are suffering from Motion sickness by PrezI? 🙂
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Prezi is a good tool, when used properly.
I am a first year student of Metropolia studying Business. Therefore there are multiple presentations to give in any given subject structure. Recently I have experimented with Prezi for several presentations and have found out some good sides and some negative ones.
Prezi frees the presenter from bonds of slide after slide -structure. Powerpoint is strictly linear and is very limited for displaying connections between ideas. Prezi is capable of a layout clarifying ideas and concepts similar to a mindmap. A single canvas with the relevant ideas structured visually can, if properly used by the presenter help the audience understand what is going on and how the concepts and issues connect to each other. The requirement for this is tha the presenter is familiar with the tool and the content of the presentation.
Students in general have learned to structure their PP presentations logically for a long time, and this is the first pitfall of Prezi. If used as a logical “slide / view” tool, it will be a mess of text, bulletpoints and ideas clumped together. Prezi requires visual perception to create an effective layout. It is the current thing to use, but it is still a tool. It can be used to add value, or it can distract from the main point.
I will personally buy a paid Prezi account if Metropolia will not acquire the student licence, purely because it is a great tool when used properly. Nevertheless I will not abandon PowerPoint completely, since it can also be used to a good effect as supporting visuals.
As always, learn your subject and support it with properly used tools; and you will do fine. Enjoyable presenting, connect with the audience and change their lives!
Sincerely,
Antti Pöyhönen
European Business Administration
Metropolia
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Prezi is a cool new tool to create visuals for presentations. I haven’t used it myself, but I saw a student group use it last week. I was amazed by the appearance of the presentation. Prezi also was more focused on key words and less text, which is really good. However, the presentation was very long and the visuals kept changing all the time. This made me feel “dizzy” and confused. I think Prezi is really good tool if the slides are kept still long enough. Definitely better than PowerPoint!
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sounds good to me but do we really need a license if students use it already now as a freeware?
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The freeware version offers only a few different colour/font -themes, and there are no modification options. The Prezi’s you make are always public and your choices of shapes, pictures etc are WAY limited.
You pay, you play, I guess 🙂
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