Prezi Presentations!

So, as we worked through this system we found that our students needed create their own accounts in order save and edit their work.  In order to save time I went in and signed each kid up for an account using their Google email addresses and passwords.  I had to have Joe open the email restrictions so I could get the confirmation email.  (Note:  Don't sign the kids up until the email restrictions have been lifted--or you have to do it all over again...the email isn't just sitting there waiting to come in.)  Once that was done...we were ready to roll!  Things seem to run much more smoothly once this decision was made.Following our last OETC training session, Gail was very excited about a Prezi presentation that Jennifer used during her presentation.  This Prezi program allows you to create a path in which you can zoom in and out throughout you Prezi.  In this example, Jennifer had created a Wordle and mixed both visuals and YouTube videos into the Wordle.  It almost looked like these extras were embedded into the the Wordle itself, but they were actually pictures placed on top of pictures.  Once the path was created you could travel throughout the Wordle itself as if it was its own space.  Pretty neat.  

After returning to school she wanted to present this tool to her 8th grade classes who were working on creating a multimedia project for their famous persons report.  Although we tried to provide a variety of tools to complete this project, one class in particular (first period) just didn't get started...they lacked inspiration.  Part of this was my fault because I didn't have any "oh-ah" examples to show them.  I know better too---good examples inspire creativity and I dropped the ball.  (Next time I would have fab examples ready for viewing.)  In addition to perhaps a lack of inspiration was the fact that giving some students so many choices was very overwhelming.  This thought was confirmed after we make the choice for the class to do a Prezi and several students commented that they were glad they didn't have to choose which tool to use.  Again, giving students this much freedom in school is foreign to them.  In the traditional classroom teachers basically have spoon fed everything to their students, now we are suddenly giving them some freedom and they don't know what to do with it.  Some groups just aren't ready for the freedom...we really need to start this process earlier in our educational system.

The next issue we had was creating paths.  For some reason this feature wasn't working for kids and the help video was not the same version that we were running.  So,  I did a little more research and discovered we needed hidden frames around everything we wanted to make a path to.

 Here are the directions:



Once the paths were created we needed to figure out how to get this document to the teacher for review.  That was as easy as clicking the share button and then the envelop to email this Prezi link to the teacher!  Yeah, one more project done!