Prezi.com is a fantastic teaching and learning tool for both media educators and students. It allows them to create multi-media presentations, as well as visual mind-maps, in a completely user-friendly, non-linear way. It is essentially a virtual white-board that can be accessed online from anywhere, and can contain text, photos, video, sound and hyperlinks. There are numerous stylistic formats to choose from as well, all of which look pretty slick. The interface is also extremely intuitive and very quick to learn.
I am a photography-based doctoral student at the Centre for Media Research at University of Ulster and have been using Prezi for all my undergrad lectures and seminars here for the past year. I can’t rave about it enough – it is so much more flexible than more linear presentation software such as PowerPoint. It is also fun to use, which is a bonus. The software is also completely free (up to 500MB of space if you are a teacher or student, which is ample), and can be accessed by my students at any time online after the lecture.
One caveat – if your Internet connection goes down the day of the presentation, you can be in trouble. You can download the Prezi software onto your laptop, and show (as well as edit) the presentation offline, as a backup. However, there is a subscription cost of $60 per year for the download, which also gives you 2GB of multi-media space (there is also a free trial period of 30 days.) This seems a little steep for only a year, but the program is excellent and well worth the cost IMHO, and all the better if you can persuade your college or university to fund it. :) See the link below!
http://prezi.com/index/
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This application looks amazing. I also wanted to let people know that there is a sign up button on the left side of the log in page for students and teachers– 500MB of storage space for free.
Thanks for posting this. I’m pretty excited.