Thursday 9 February 2012

Killing three birds with one Prezi

After an absence of a whopping six months I am attempting to return to this blog! I'm not sure if anyone else will ever see it, but it will at least get me to reflect on some of my development activities in a focused way. With the introduction of the CPD hour, my desire to recommence the 23 things programme and being asked to do an introduction to digitisation for the graduate trainees, I thought I would kill all those birds with one stone by trying out Prezi!

For my first experience of using Prezi I certainly found it time consuming, and it did take me quite a while to get used to the different way of using it. I'm still not sure how some of the things I've seen are achieved and this probably means I need to spend more time, look at the help guides or talk to other people. I am noticing that my learning style can be to be impatient and insular! On the upside I'm fairly pleased with what I produced. I love the fact that Prezi already has its own bank of images to select from. I had already started thinking a bit more out of the box in terms of what images to use for presentations following week 3 but this presentation cemented that. Still not totally sure whether I needed to use any acknowledgements with the Prezzi images I used though?

What I especially liked about using Prezi is that it got me out of my linear logical mindset and into a more visual creative space. Last year when devising a PowerPoint on digitisation I tried to get all the slides to summarise the main points in words, which actually made the presentation a bit dull. Whereas this time I used many more images and minimal wording on the screen just as prompts and fleshed everything out verbally in the presentation. I really quite like the look and feel of the presentation which was achieved with minimal expertise just using Prezi's own image bank and a template. I tried to use a template organogram type thing they had but basically had to deconstruct it to get it to fit my purpose, so some of it was quite fiddly. I would benefit from enhancing my knowledge on how to manipulate images in other programmes, as I had screen shots I wanted to use but couldn't work out how to upload them as images without the whole word doc appearing.

I have tried to refresh my memory on inserting images from creative commons - to no avail as the urls aren't working. So you will have to imagine a picture of a bird at the top and I will have to investigate further!