The journey of a future librarian

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Like Google Docs, try this:

I have become quite a fan of Google Docs, how wonderful is it to have a place were you can write down your ideas on some project and then share it with other who can add their own contributions. I have found it to be a valuable tool in group projects, because it is hard to always be able to get together, so Google Docs provides the environment to come together with all our ideas in one place. No need to worry about lost emails anymore, it is all right there. 

However, there is an other online collaboration tool that I really like to use: Prezi.com. It is actually advertised as a presentation tool, sort of like PowerPoint but not really. However, it has the wonderful ability of allowing multiple contributors on the same presentation. This tool can be easily incorporated into the classroom environment. Students are always asked to do presentations for classes, so why not have them try out something different from PowerPoint. They can put all their ideas down on the Prezi canvas, and then decide what ones they want to present. Again, no need to attach PowerPoints to emails and worry about formatting issues between computers. It's fabulous!

4 comments:

Julianne Wise said...

I haven't tried it yet but apparently you can also deliver a presentation collaboratively even if the presenters are not co-located.

Anonymous said...

Pauline used lots of Prezi Presentations in 511. I haven't gotten a great grasp on them yet. Definitely a tool I need to experiment with more!

Marilyn Arnone said...

Glad you pointed out the collaborative benefits of Prezi, too. It is something we didn't touch upon in class but a definite benefit that goes beyond a great presentation tool.

The Wise Librarian said...

Quick cautionary tale--be sure to save any Prezi's to a local drive. Over the last few weeks, the Prezi server has gone down twice for a couple hours at a time ruining live demos worldwide. You can't make any edits to a local presentation unless you have the full subscription version of the software and links to embedded video won't work but at least you would have something to present from if the Prezi server fails 5 minutes before showtime.

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