Hi Everyone!
This week, the Secondary Series is presenting a week long series of Back to School Tech Tips. Each night, a few of our girls are presenting for 10 minutes on an awesome tech tip you are not going to want to miss. If you have not signed up to be part of our Secondary Series, you can find the link here. The best part of our Tech Series is if you complete and answer the exit questions for the entire series, you can earn PD hours as well as a chance of winning a $50 gift card!!
Tonight at 7:20 CST/ 8:20 EST, I will presenting on the tech tip topic, "Using Prezi in the Classroom-For Students & Teachers". You have to come and see this, and I may even blow your educational mind!
What is Prezi?
Prezi is a web-based, fancy, interactive PowerPoint, as I call it. The reason why I love using it in my classroom is because the presentation itself is completely engaging, and my students love watching them. You can embed videos much easier than on PowerPoint, and the most amazing part, is most Prezi presentations are public, so you can use and share other peoples' Prezis (You will have to sign up for a free account first before viewing the presentations). You cannot go wrong with FREE presentations!
How can teachers use Prezi in their classroom?
Back to School Night:
I have created Prezi presentations for back to school night. You can check out this presentation here. Feel free to make a copy for yourself, and use it for your classroom!
Novel Introductions:
One of the best ways to use Prezi in the classroom is introducing a new topic. In English, this is fantastic for introducing a novel. Check out this Prezi I found on To Kill a Mockingbird. It is utterly amazing!
Teaching a Term or Skill:
I also created my own Prezi for Making Inferences. You can find it here:
Another incredible way to use Prezi in your classroom is for review purposes. Let's say after one of our breaks, you want to do a quick review of literary terms with your students, just so you can refresh their memory. Go to "Explore", type in "literary terms", and VIOLA! Look at this Prezi I found that has tons of short clips embedded into the presentation:
How can my students use Prezi for classroom assignments or projects?
Projects:
Prezi is an excellent tool for students to use to create presentations. It is very similar to PowerPoint, and they just have to get used to a few different techniques when adding and creating new pieces in their presentation. I actually have my students create their Genius Hour Pitches in Prezi, and if they use Prezi for the first time, most of students say they would definitely choose Prezi over PowerPoint.
Here is is a Prezi created to take someone who has never used Prezi on a quick tutorial:
Book Talks:
Have your students create a presentation on a book they read, and have them present it to the class. The students can add video, pictures, and many other engaging pieces to give their audience a great understanding of the book.
Teach a Term/Teach the Class:
Have you ever assigned your students to teach a term or time period to the class? Have your students group together and create a Prezi on a specific term, method, or time period! The students then can present their presentations to the class, and the class has to take notes on the presentations. Brilliant, right?!?!
**Your students will have to create their own accounts, along with using an e-mail and password to log in.**
I hope this has been informative for you, and I hope you go and try Prezi. The website is www.prezi.com. Go, and start working on a presentation for the new school year!
