You Spin Me Right Round, Prezi, Right Round

The song, originally by British band Dead or Alive has been covered by a number of musicians including Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Billy Idol and Dope. I sang and danced to it often when I was in high school, and it is how I felt when watching a Prezi presentation. But not in a good way. More in a “please pass the gravol” way.

Prezi is a means of creating presentations in a non-linear way using words, pictures and videos. I first encountered Prezi during a library conference when author Judith Graves used it for her presentation. I have to admit it; I was both intrigued (although doubtful that anything could be presented coherently in a zoomy, swirly manner) and a little nauseous. It was the nausea that has kept me from ever exploring it more closely despite teacher-friends telling me what a wonderful tool it is. Then a classmate in this class presented her “biography of a tech user” in a Prezi but in a nice, linear manner. I liked it. I wasn’t nauseous. I was intrigued and now here I am exploring it.

I know – the whole point of Prezi is to be non-linear. But let’s face it, some of us just ARE linear or need to have information presented to them in a linear manner. Certain information has to be presented in order; sometimes step one just has to come before steps two and three. That doesn’t mean Prezi cannot be a powerful presentation tool.

A Prezi presentation is created on one large canvas. The entire presentation can then be choreographed into zooms and swivels across that canvas, focussing in on each area of the presentation before moving on to the next. In fact, the “zoom” feature of Prezi does what I have been cropping and pasting into my good old fashioned PowerPoint presentations for years. Timm tells us that “anyone can use it” (2010, p. 28) and that “you must use Prezi to truly understand how it can fit into your workflow and improve your finished product” (2010, p. 29)

So use it I have. First, I watched the tutorials on the Prezi website (which are surprisingly entertaining and informative) then I just jumped in. Prezi offers a series of templates, but I chose to go with the very plain one called “blank” and build from there.  My first attempt won’t go down in history as anything special, but to be honest, the most difficult part was creating and cropping the screen captures to use. I tried to break myself of the linear habit, but truthfully, I’m not terribly pleased with the circular structure I chose, either.

One of the tutorials taught me that one could create a Prezi out of an existing PowerPoint presentation. Very simply, one saves their presentation as a PDF then imports it into Prezi. The result, if left alone, is still a straightforward slide presentation, but with a little playing, one can take advantage of the zooming feature (that is the feature that really makes Prezi special in my opinion) and voila! A fancy version of a plain old presentation (warning, there’s a little adult content in this presentation).

Uploading the PowerPoint presentation allowed me to realize that one could lay out the presentation linearly and still have some fun with it. I had to try for myself. Once again, the screen captures and the cropping took longer than anything. Once that is done, pulling together a presentation really only takes a few minutes. I do need to work on the resolution of the images I use, though.

What can I see Prezi being used for? I think this is certainly a case of picking one’s audience. I cannot imagine using Prezi to present my budget requisition to our municipality nor can I imagine it as a tool for many of my board meetings (although it certainly could be used in more formal settings like this one about MRI’s). I can, however, imagine it for library instruction in cases such as:

·         showing people how to use the library catalogue or database

·         showing someone how to download a book to their ereader

·         sharing photos and videos from a library event

·         providing an online tour of the library

·         creating a presentation version of our annual report (leaving it on a loop would be a wonderful way to capture people’s attention!)

or any number of other less formal opportunities. Embedding them directly into the library’s website would enable patrons to access instruction anytime! Prezi sets up options for you to tweet or share on facebook in just a few clicks, too. I am starting to see how these Web 2.0 tools are going to work well together.

 

The people at Prezi seem to want you to succeed so they have provided a number of their presentations in a showcase . They even encourage people to build their own presentations based on the samples they have posted on the site. If you are working on a Prezi with another person, you don’t even have to be in the same room/community/country. Shared editing is simple and the tutorials also walk you through how to set up a Prezi so people can watch it in 10 different locations simultaneously. Imagine the potential!

Although Prezi hasn’t been written up much in the library literature (or even in the required textbooks for this course), I certainly see the value in this tool and would encourage other librarians to try it out.

By the way, I miss 80's hair bands.

Read what I read:

Schiller, K. (2011). High-Tech Classrooms. Information Today, 28(8), 34-35.

Timm, D. (2010). Prezi: One Cool Tool for Making Presentations. Louisiana Libraries, 73(1), 28-9.