Alternatives to PowerPoint in the classroom
We’ve all seen the presentation “Death by PowerPoint” .. if you haven’t, shame on you and go and see it now – “Death by PowerPoint / SlideShare“.
This isn’t to say that using PowerPoint is wrong, or should be stopped. It highlights the techniques that are used over and over again to bore the audience, and should wake us all up to the variety of different ways we can generate interesting design concepts to (properly) display our thoughts, theories, work, ideas, data, etc.
This is all well and good, and it can make presentations more interesting and more appealing. But what if you want to take your presenting style to the next level? What about a non-linear presentation where you need to jump around the data and results, or the theory needs overview and details all mixed up together … PowerPoint itself can’t do this easily.
Is there an alternative? Yes. While the list is fairly short at the moment, I’m sure it will grow as the advantages are realised and other providers bring out their offerings. So, what do we have;
Prezi – www.prezi.com
Billed as “the coolest online presentation tool I have ever seen” and “you no longer have slides – you have a huge canvas to play with”, Prezi is best described by clicking below and watching their promotional presentation;
This is non-linear presenting in such an interesting way. You can It is possibly most effective when you want to present the big picture – for example a model, a timeline or a map – that becomes your canvas. Using Prezi you can zoom in on details and then zoom back out to the big picture. This kind of functionality will transform the audience experience.
pptPlex – www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex
Using an add-in to PowerPoint 2007 you can layout all your slides on one “canvas” and then zoom in on specific slides during the presentation. Watch the promotional video (WMV) by clicking the image below:
I’m still trying to find an actual example of a presentation made with pptPlex, so when I do I’ll update this post with the details. Without seeing it in action it’s difficult to say what it’ll be like, but it is certainly a good start in making presentations more dynamic and less linear.
Are these the only two? Well, they’re the ones I could find. A colleague found one other than showed potential …
Ventuz – www.ventuz.com. It is described as “the next generation tool for professional high-end presentations … [with] stunning 3D and multimedia content and displaying your presentations in the most effective and mind-blowing ways.”
Do you know of another? If so please share with us here.
Big fan of Prezi, have used it for some big presentations and for a half-days teaching – all of the students wanted to know more about it!
Ben
Thanks for the quick and positive response. Do you have an example you could show us of one of your presentations please, I’m really keen to see it in use?
David.
Students have been actively using http://www.doink.com in lieu of PowerPoint in a variety of subjects including Science, English, Math, History, etc. What they like is how easy it is to animate their presentations with DoInk and the fact that they can re-use shared art (over 650,000 pieces of art)from the community rather than drawing everything from scratch. Any clip created in DoInk can easily be embedded in a site, blog, Facebook, MySpace, downloaded, Tweeted or pushed to YouTube.
Ben
Thanks for letting us see your Web 2.0 presentation you made with Prezi – http://bit.ly/3FMsC3 – I like what you did and am looking to see what I can come up with myself.
Karen
I like the look of Doink, thanks for pointing it out.
David.
I have been discussing and trying Prezi in class, the discussion was actually proposed by one of my students, who then went ahead and researched Prezi and did the presentation with it. Great! In addition to the tools you mention, there’s also Ahead, http://ahead.com. Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks interesting.
I’m a multimedia student and we use http://www.ahead.com for presenting designs and flow charts at school. Awsome!
I have a feeling that Prezi is regarded as cool because it’s different. Personally, I find it much more time consumimg to produce a great presentation in Prezi, and find I need to plan the presentation in quite a bit of detail in advance. Maybe this is a reflection of me having spent too many years producing linear presentations. Maybe my brain doesn’t work in the way Prezi does. I’ve also found some audiences don’t take to all the zooming and swooping around the screen that Prezi does finding it a little discomforting.
Ricardo / William
Thanks for the recommendation of http://www.ahead.com, I’ll give it a look.
John
I agree that there can be a lot of swooping and zooming, but as we control how we create the presentation surely we can build in as much or as little as we like? I spent 4 hours yesterday transforming a static PowerPoint in to a lovely little Prezi version and it is far more labour intensive to produce, but the results do show a clearer, more modern approach.
The true test will be showing it to the students, see which they would prefer to see on a regular basis. With a little experience of students and what they like (iPhone not Blackberry, Facebook not Twitter, etc) then it could be too close to call. I’ll let you know what kind of results we get.
David.
Thanks for this post David, I think it raises many questions. The comments above confirm this.
May I take a slightly opposing view?
I tend to work more with teachers than students these days, and there is still a huge misuse of this sort of technology, which you rightly refer to at the beginning of your post. However, simply introducing brighter and shinier technologies will not change that. So the few teachers who ‘get it’ might be able to make their sessions more interesting, entertaining and (hopefully) engaging with Prezzi and the like (and thank you to all your respondents for the new links and advice) but others will just have another tool to misuse and create disengagement.
I’m still a PPT user. I think I can make it sing and dance enough to ensure that the viewer is not put off by the technology (whether 1:1 or 1:many) and strive whenever I have the chance to help teachers understand the things it CAN do rather than the things they THINK it can do. Live internet, informative animations, timers, interactive text boxes and layered video are all possible – but rarely used.
So – whilst applauding the users of the plethora of new tools I must shout out a note of warning. Don’t let the dazzle of new stuff blind you to the potential of the old (or misuse of the new).
David
David
Nicely put, thank you. I certainly wouldn’t recommend ditching the use of PPT but would love to see it used ‘properly’, or at least with a little more thought and consideration to keep the audience awake!
I often find that, during a presentation, a question is raised that is actually covered later on. While sometimes you can say “I’ll cover this later” it is also useful to be able to just quickly jump to the appropriate ‘slide’ … therefore the presenting software needs to be flexible to allow this non-linear progression. PowerPoint cannot (unless you skip forwards through slides).
I have not had chance to try pptPlex yet, but it does look more flexible / non-linear and could be even better than Prezi.
If you read my other posts I am a firm believer in a ‘considered use’ of technology, where it can ‘add value’ to what you are doing, not simply using it because you can or because you feel you should. Not everything will work in all situations. Prezi will work in a multimedia school, but an accountant might not appreciate the finer points of design and interaction (?) … the ‘considered approach’ is needed here.
Regrards, David
Bad presentations are created by presenters who make bad choices. Not as a result of the technology they are using. Humans are actually misusing the technology. Throwing new tools at an old problem will not solve the problem (bad presentations). The slides, no matter where they live, are too often used as the crutch for the presenter and not as the visuals for the audience. The tools that provide an easier way to create a non-liner presentation will ultimately work better only if the presenter is comfortable moving around – possibly randomly or based on audience input.
Until presenters (& teachers) learn to create and use visuals in better, more effective ways, the development of bad presentations will continue. If not in PPT, in Prezi, Ahead, and all the other new presentation tools now available.
I’m a big fan of prezi as a visual story telling tool but they are time consuming to create. Here is an example of a prezi style interface within PowerPoint offering a visually interactive non linear user interface. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hks-4J-0HTc
You can run a multi-site version of WordPress from a USB stick. By adding various plugins to WP, you can create a powerful presentation tool that incorporates Web 2.0 tools such as Prezi, Dipity, YouTube, etc.
I like powerpoint and I like prezi but which is better there’s only one way to find out…
…FIGHT!
Boring presentations can be produced using either pieces of software. The habit of using slides to display bullet pointed lists is not an effective way to communicate zooming in and out of these lists really doesn’t make it any better.
There is a presentation from Coca-Cola on the Prezi website which is no better than just using PowerPoint to display the bullet points.