I’ll admit, I held off on writing this blog until it was the new section started. Working with my group was great, I think we chose a decent and relevant topic (Twitter) and everyone contributed equally without having to be yelled at.  And Gabby didn’t complain too much

The only thing that didn’t go smoothly was the initial Prezi set-up. I had never used Prezi and didn’t know what to except.  Although I haven’t used Powerpoint in awhile, I still use Google Docs’ Presentation application frequently so I was accustomed to both making presentations online and the traditional way of making a presentation for class.  Prezi did away with essentially everything we normally associated with ppt creation. No slides… no transition effects… no vast arrays of colors and fonts.

Instead Prezi gives you a large canvas in which to plant elements which can then be linked together to make a cohesive presentation.  It’s definitely a new approach and I can appreciate some of the things it does well.  The element linking and creation is devilishly creative. Prezi automatically creates the path between them for a smooth and professional look. The zooming you can achieve is also nice, such as when you overlay images with small elements and Prezi will magically zoom in so that the small text is suddenly huge and legible.

Prezi is still hampered by some problems though. For example, you can only choose 3 fonts per presentation.  Also, there are no transition effects. Another annoyance I encountered was the limited amount of shapes I could use from within the web app.  I don’t want to have to use GIMP to make a shape and then import it.

The biggest problem I had with Prezi is that I couldn’t link everything in an element together.  If I wanted to move an element, all of the smaller elements within would have to be moved and changed independently.  I want to be able to move everything altogether at once, it’d make for a much smoother creation process.  There may be a way to do this, but sadly I didn’t see it.

I may use Prezi in the future, but I wasn’t impressed enough to profess my love of it or swear off Google’s (arguably superior) offering.

– Paul