I have had good feedback from two recent presentations using Prezi (JISC funded Kultivate and eNova projects). These were both end-of-project presentations, so Prezi let me take a range of material – a few PowerPoint slides (PDF); some images and screenshots; a couple of screencasts (which play fine on the offline version as I imported SWF files) – and then pull this together with Prezi’s own tools and features into a narrative.
This has inspired the following new list of pros and cons with Prezi:
Prezi is perfect for …
- telling a story
- providing context
- opening up new modes of thinking – ideal for research thinking
- providing a canvas, which is great for creative people
- Prezi really works beautifully with PDF, SWF and FLV file formats
- even though more and more people are using Prezi it is still possible to provide that ‘wow’ factor, which is always a bonus
Prezi could improve …
- stop showing the bracket frame and ‘Double-click to add text’ EVERY time you select ‘blank canvas’ from the templates dialogue
- allow more than three types/styles of font at one time
- give clear warnings if the file sizes are too large which makes Prezi crash (Prezi’s that download for offline use at about 25 MB or less seem okay, but 40MB + just doesn’t seem to work)
- part of me thinks it would be great if Prezi could enhance tools like editing images and creating shapes; but the other part of me appreciates the simplicity i.e. you can do effects in other programmes and then import them – but maybe more integration with the Adobe family of products would be good (e.g. this is something Extensis Portfolio offers for example)
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