Pros and Cons of Prezi

I have mixed feelings about my first exposure to using Prezi.  There were positives and negatives for me with this experience.   I did not always find it to be very user-friendly.   One of the things that frustrated me the most was having to re-do portions of the presentation multiple times after logging off.  My entire presentation was rotated with no ability to correct it.  I had to re-align everything.  The only solution was to put a frame around the entire presentation to prevent this from happening.  This made my presentation look strange to me.   Some of the slides also would not completely rotate even after framing everything.  That made for tedious alterations that should not have been necessary.   I also had trouble getting the paths to show the specific part that I wanted.  Nothing was centered no matter how I tried to manipulate the paths.  The paths got to be a bit much with the motion, and I felt like that took away from the presentation.  There is also no ability to use audio or podcasting within the presentation.

One of the features that I did like was the ability to put a video into the presentation.  It was just a simple copy and paste.  I can see this being particularly helpful in a classroom setting.  There are so many steps to go through when including a video in PowerPoint, so this was very refreshing.  I also liked being able to see the entire canvas of the presentation at one time.  That was visually appealing and was helpful in knowing what else needed to be included.  It is also nice to be able to access the presentation from any computer with internet access.  For a teacher, this could be extremely useful.

Overall, I am not sure that Prezi will be something that I will use a lot in the future.   It may be because I am just simply more familiar with PowerPoint so that is easier for me to use.   It may be that I just need to play with it a little bit more to get myself more comfortable with some of the features.  I am glad to have been exposed to this as a viable option for creating presentations.