I recently came across Maria Anderson’s presentation Playing to Learn? while browsing through her Teaching College Math Web site. The layout of the presentation mimics a large game board with a flowing channel formed by consecutive progressing squares. Each forward click triggers either a panned movement or a zooming effect, which gave me the illusion of being in a video game.

Playing to Learn? on Prezi

The tool Maria used to create this presentation is called Prezi. It is a one-year-old Web tool created by two Hungarian designers. The fact that Prezi was brought into the United States by TED, the global advocate of creative ideas, says a lot about the value of this new tool. It allows presenters to break the convention of slide-by-slide creation; instead, it offers users a drawing board—a canvas—on which to present all the information, either all at once or piece by piece.

I was thrilled by the zooming effect between the big picture and the tiny details within it because it helps prevent viewers from losing track of the overall structure as they maneuver deeper into the presentation. This is usually the problem with PowerPoint presentations—a problem I have been trying to resolve by including the main structure on every slide or adding a quasi-zooming effect by highlighting some areas and dimming the rest.

Besides keeping track of the big picture or concept, what else can Prezi do? With this question in mind, I started to explore the Prezi site for more examples. The site has a very clean look, and it’s very easy to navigate. However, as I got into the middle of the third Prezi show, I started to get motion sickness and feel light-headed, as if I was watching a home-made video shot without a tripod. I wanted to bypass some zooming and panning transitions to see the next slide, but it wouldn’t let me.

As my excitement cooled down, I started to look at it through my instructional designer’s lens. Prezi, like all the other tech tools, was invented to serve some purposes but not every purpose. It will work well in some situations, and it may not work at all for others.

After spending a few days testing this tool, I think the following scenarios may be suited for the use of Prezi:

1. Presenting a complicated structure or a concept map
   If you need to present a large illustration of multiple concepts that are interconnected, Prezi can be a good choice. It is the best tool I have seen yet for toggling between big and small areas of one image. It also allows the flexibility to zoom in and out during a presentation based on questions or concerns raised by the audience.
2. Presenting graphic works (developed in other graphic applications)
   At this point, Prezi’s drawing and designing tools for content creation on the canvas are very limited: although you have a few design templates to choose from, you can’t change the font color, pick the font type, put in a new background color, or add objects (beyond the limited options given). Adobe Illustrator would be a much better choice for content creation, or you can simply draw it on paper and scan and upload it into Prezi. The most attractive Prezi shows are cartoonish presentations, and those drawings were certainly not done in Prezi.
3. For audiences of the video game generation
   I realized that many of the Prezi presentations were created by K-12 teachers. The viewers of these presentations, I would assume, are more used to moving and rolling images on a screen. Animated transitions, when they are not used too excessively, may help young people focus.
4. For marketing and reinforcement of a key word, a main concept, or an image
   I am preparing a presentation for our new faculty orientation. I know that during this two-day event, new faculty members will receive tons of information from various departments, almost all of which have acronym names.  Client Verge Inc’s services are tailored for your success. They probably won’t pay attention to any of those, but if one gets retained in their memory, I’d want it to be FITS—the new name of my department—because FITS was presented with Prezi:

FITS on Prezi