[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOo08AEfyCQ?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=426&h=256%5D
I’ve been very impressed with what Prezi can do as a presentation tool (used thoughtfully, and in the hands of a good presenter, of course!), and have had a couple of goes at working something up with it myself in recent weeks. Recently I saw a group of primary school girls working with it in a very creative way to present what they were learning in a time-line of events and saw first-hand just how easily it could add so dynamically to what they had to say.
So tonight I was very interested to see the release of Prezi meeting – bringing real-time collaboration to the Prezi platform. It is available for free to all Prezi users, but for private presentations and access to Prezi Desktop, users have to pay a monthly fee. Real-time collaboration tools have been around for a while – I’ve been using Elluminate and Adobe Connect for a while now – but what seems to make Prezi Meeting a little different is its interface in which participants appear as avatars in the online area they are editing. Prezi meeting allows for up to ten presenters to collaboratively build presentation storyboards, with team members seeing changes as they happen.
I’m looking forward now to trying this out with some friends!
Really good tool IMO and will get better as time goes on. I think it goes way beyond a presentation tool though. I’ve used it as a brainstorm tool, a tool to collate important quotes from docs that I can get to and show people from anywhere, as a teaching tool and now as a collaboration tool for teachers and students. Once the capabilities to e.g. embed your livebinders into your prezi (can’t find a way to do this) then perhaps we are looking at the real future for collaboration software. The drag and drop capabilities just make things so easy.
I’ve thought about a hierarchy of prezis for planning purposes so that for a teacher e.g. a termly plan goes on top level prezi with separate prezi linked or embedded into the top layer with a weekly plan and so on.
I know this is a presentation tool in first instance but I reckon there is a real opportunity here to turn this tool into a really great (as opposed to really good) tool by getting GCSN for example to see if we can guide the development.