Prezi: Love It or Hate It

Prezi is an online presentation tool, à la Powerpoint, but which is anything but linear.  It zooms, it spins, it allows the creation of text within images within text down the most minute unreadable size until zooming in on what is important at a specific point in the presentation.

Honestly, I HATE Prezi.  I hate working with the platform, and for the most part watching Prezi presentations makes me dizzy.

HOWEVER, my students LOVE it.  (Go figure).  I took a workshop over the summer, and was forced to make a Prezi.   I used the opportunity to update my opening day Powerpoint, and my students thought it was "really cool".  I haven't made another Prezi since, and I don't feel I'm missing anything.

When many of my students reached the point where they were ready to create a project about their families,  I bit the bullet, and made Prezi an option.  The students who chose it, really enjoyed the platform, and they required very little guidance to create their presentations.   The most difficult part for them seemed to be creating paths -- some did not do that at all, but with only five "slides" required, I could easily click through the presentation and see what I needed to see.

I have to laugh, because after attending a workshop dedicated to Prezi (prior to the one I attended this summer) and still I struggled to make a Prezi I was happy with, yet the majority of my students took to it very intuitively.  Pretty amazing.

Colleagues I have spoken with seem to either love Prezi, or hate it -- a left/right brain thing, perhaps?

Although I am definitely not in the "love it" camp, I will continue to make Prezi an option for student presentations.  If it's something that inspires them, who am I to crush their creativity for my own comfort?

What do you think?