I think Prezi's are great. I love the idea of being able to demonstrate concepts in a non-linear fashion and zoom in on important words or images. Importantly, they are really fun to watch. There is something intuitive about moving from one piece of information to the next and honing in on the key aspects. A well constructed Prezi would suit most learners, as it would facilitate both 'doing' and reflecting, learning facts as well as learning the relationships and links between ideas, using visual imagery as well as words and displaying information both sequentially and globally.
Unfortunately, in practice, I found the process of creating a Prezi to be quite challenging. The application crashed several times whileI was working on my Prezi and the pathway between the 'slides' kept changing automatically. It took quite a while to generate even a very basic Prezi. When I went to add images, a warning came up to indicate that the application was likely to crash if several large image files were used. For this reason, I resized the images and did not attempt to add audio or video.
Prezi's would be ideal for students to prepare presentations to demonstrate understanding. A Prezi gives students the flexibility to go into greater detail on a particular area of interest and share their knowledge with the class. However, given the problems I had, I would be slightly wary of having students work on creating their own Prezi. I think I would recommend they use one of the (albeit quite basic) standard templates rather than a blank template.
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