Thursday, July 25, 2013

Thursday Tutorial - Prezi

***HUGE DISCLAIMER: Prezi requires that your cell phone or tablet has Flash Player capabilities. Which apparently Android does NOT!! These presentations only work on iPhones and their tablets. Ug!


I often do things backwards. Like today's blog post, I am going back to the beginning of the Prezi tips and tutorials to find out how to set up an online presentation. This is after I struggled through creating my own for last week's QR code tutorial.

Prezi works off the same principals as Powerpoint. If you aren't familiar with that program, it is basically a slideshow that you can create that will run automatically through each slide or the viewer can click through using their keypad. You create each slide individually and add movements and even sounds and voice recordings if you like. Prezi is just a way to share it online.

What's really cool is that Prezi allows you to work simultaneously with others on the same slideshow. Think of the applications this could have for college students!

Once you sign in, there are actually tons of helpful videos that you can watch that help you get started on your presentation. There are a ton of 'metaphor' templates for you to choose from. Think about the information you are providing and then look over the templates to find one that matches it. Maybe your new blog creation was similar to climbing a mountain (I almost used the word 'like' in there. Big no no for metaphors). Choose your template and click on the slides over to the left to change the formatted information on each of the slides to match your own messages.



You can click anywhere on the original slide to add text and even place a youTube video using the controls at the top of the screen where it says 'insert.' Or you could bring over presentations you spent weeks creating in Powerpoint right into Prezi. Pretty cool.

You can add text boxes and remove others. You can change up the order of slides and make it your own. Moving the frames around on the template is as easy as clicking and holding then pulling it to where you want it to be. Adding images and new frames is done through the controls at the top under 'Frames and Arrows' and 'Insert' where you can maneuver through your files to find images you might have saved there.

Once you are ready to share with others, click on the 'Present Online' option and copy that link to give to others. I made the mistake of copying the URL from the 'Share' feature and it wouldn't let people in to see the slideshow. So both of my QR codes had to be redone. Bummer.

But it seems I wasn't too far off the mark for creating my own Prezi online presentation. I guess it was more self-explanatory than I thought. My biggest problem was that I couldn't figure out how to get down to each individual slide to add information. I kept clicking on the original slide, but it wouldn't come up. Then I realized I had to click on the separate slides over to the left to change the information.

I still have a few questions though.
*How can I copy and paste an entire frame?
*How do I make sure that the text, such as subtitle, are exactly the same size. They only had the bigger and smaller keys and you can pull out the frames to enlarge the text size, but who knows if you pull out every text size to the same?


If you are interested in joining Prezi, use this Referral Link and tell them ScrappyGuy sent ya!

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