If you are like me, every time someone shows me a PowerPoint presentation, part of my brain shuts down. PowerPoint is a good tool, but a tool that has been greatly overused. Instead of having your students use PowerPoint in the classroom, why not suggest one of these alternatives?
Prezi is a zooming digital presentation editor. It’s Powerpoint on steroids! What did he say? STEROIDS! There’ll be mandatory testing in the future. Type text, embed pictures, and insert video are all features that Prezi puts forth to creators. Unlike Powerpoint, Prezi is free and extremely portable. Because it’s web based, Prezi can be created and shown on any computer with web access. If there is no web access available during your presentation, a downloadable version can be obtained to show offline anywhere. No other software needed, not even flash! Prezi also performs quite well in creating a visual organizer. As they claim on their site, “With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way.”
Glogster is a social network that allows users to create free interactive posters, or glogs. A glog, short for graphical blog, is an interactive multimedia image. It looks like a poster, but readers can interact with the content. Glogster provides an environment to design interactive posters. The user inserts text, images, photos, audio (MP3), videos, special effects and other elements into their glogs to generate a multimedia online creation. Posters can be shared with other users on the site, embedded in external wikis or blogs, and shared via many social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Glogs can also be exported and saved to computer-compatible formats.
Questions or comments? Do you have something to contribute? Email Warren Griffiths, Technology Integration Coordinator at wgriffiths@isp.edu.pa
International School of Panama - 21st Century Skills 