More Prezi

I spent some more time exploring Prezi: both the creation of new material and the viewing of already extant prezis.  My understanding of what the tool can be used for, although far from complete, is certainly more thorough. 
Many people have created prezis to present ideas, probably for a specific group or purpose.  I found a number of prezis about education.  This one by Michael Gerard introducing concepts of 21st Century Education was interesting.  When I tried to find useful prezis on a range of professional development topics that might interest me, I found the selection was limited and the quality questionable.  Anybody can publish a prezi, and no source information is required, so I would say that prezis have limited use for independent exploration and learning.  I found the same thing when I tried to find a  quality prezi that I could use to introduce or review curricular content with my class: selection was limited and reliability and quality were questionable.
Prezi does, however, provide a fun, different way to create your own presentation.  I created a presentation to review the properties of light with my grade 4/5 class.  We have done reading and experimentation around each property of light, and this presentation will allow my students a quick, engaging way to review what we have been working on.  It didn't take me too long to make, and I think that my class will find it helpful and enjoyable.  I especially enjoyed how easy it is to embed youtube videos into a prezi.
While making this prezi for my class was great, I would much rather have my class create and publish their own work than just view mine.  The limitation of Prezi, as with Voicethread, is that each account needs to have its own email address.  If I could get around that speed bump, I think that Prezi would be a great tool to use in the classroom.  Will Richardson (2010), in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms has some useful tips and suggestions for having students safely publish their work on the Web.  One of the most important things he recommends is involving parents in any decisions about publishing student work online.  Parents, students, and teachers all need to feel comfortable with the degree of personal information and work shared in such a permanent, public environment.
Publishing work online can help motivate students by providing them with a very real, very global, audience.  With purposeful, targeted teaching, we can help students to safely publish their work in this Web 2.0 environment.  It is then just a matter of logistics: how do we find tools that 30 young children can use at once, when they are not allowed to have email addresses, and our limited budgets make the educational versions of many products an impossibility?