Prezi

WOW.  That was quite an undertaking. I admit had I had some fun, but making this took several more hours than I really had time for. PowerPoint is also time-consuming if you care about your end-product, but it is also more straightforward.  Of course, I have used PowerPoint before so that may be coloring how I see its ease of use compare to this.  Frankly, once I got used to it, Prezi's interface was decent and included some very cool tools.  Zooming around is also new and different, but for my lesson I am not sure it added value. It certainly made planning tricker!  I will share what I made with my first grade team and see if they think it is useful.  Here is my Prezi on Plants (SOL 1.4).  See below for embedded copy.

Standards addressed:  standard 1 - this was creative and is certainly a different and unique of presenting this material.  If students were old enough to use this took they would have a lot of fun with it I imagine. Standard 2 could also be relevant here, depending on your subject matter, Prezi could be a very valuable way of presenting information.  For my purposes it was not needed, but as the tutorials showed, for some topics the zooming could actually enhance understanding.  And, as always, standard 3 requires that teachers push themselves to stay abreast of new technological tools.  This was not easy for me, but that is not a reason to not give something new a try.

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