Book Review: “Prezi for Education How-to”

“Instant Prezi for Education How-to” is written by Domi Sinclair (@Lilly_Stardust to you and me) and build on her experience and background as a Learning Technologist at University College London.

Designed as a short ‘instant’ book (I read the MOBI formatted file for Kindle, using the Kindle App) it is well structured and covers the basic details of Prezi for anyone new to the tool, and is sufficiently detailed for experienced Prezi users to find something new and useful too.

“This book is for people in education who are bored of delivering the same old presentations to their students (or perhaps it is the students who are bored!). This is for people who would like to increase student engagement by using more dynamic tools. This is for people who have not used Prezi before and may not be technically minded, but are willing to learn and utilise this online presentation aid.” 

Domi has experience and background in learning technology and this is evident in her approach to Prezi and how to present the various features and techniques. The features are introduced respectfully and are labelled as being for ‘simple’ Prezi use or ‘intermediate’ or ‘advanced’ depending on the readers experience of using the system. This also gives novice Prezi users something to aim towards and shows them the full capabilities of Prezi without confusing them with complicated ideals and / or technical language too early on.

Of course the book is only as fresh as the system it’s written about, and no doubt Prezi will add new features in time , change the interface (again), alter how some functions work, but this book has enough in it for the reader to adapt the instructions and techniques to whatever interface Prezi is currently showing.