Prezenting Prezi!

Ok, so don't get me wrong...PowerPoint is very cool. With all the animations and transitions and hyperlinks...yea. But have you ever wanted more? Last year I attended an awesome 2 day conference called NCTIES (North Carolina Technology In Education Society). It was my second time and wowza! I loved it! Being around people who speak my language...AWESOME! **Squirrel** So, back to the point...At that conference I learned about an wonderful online, free tool called Prezi. It is so much fun! With Prezi, you can create multimedias, similar to PowerPoint, but sooo much better! They zoom and twist, incorporate videos, photos and links! Instead of having slides, you have one space, kinda like a table top, where you can place everything and see it's relation to everything else. By incorporating frames and paths (which are what make it twist and turn and zoom) your Prezi moves on it's own. My students love it! They say it's like making their own movie! It can be a little tricky until you get the hang of it, so I haven't used it with any of my students younger than 2nd grade. But this year, I plan to do a simple Prezi with my first graders, who, last year in Kindergarten, created complete PowerPoints with transitions, photos, and sound. I think they're ready!
Now, there are 3 different licenses, 1 free and 2 that'll cost ya, but if you sign up with a valid school email, then you get the mid-grade for free. My kids don't have school emails, grrr, so I just let them  use my email address to sign in and just made a generic password. It's good because I can login and see all of their Prezi's on my profile and track their progress. What's really cool is your Prezi's can be downloaded to your computer and viewed offline at anytime! The creators of Prezi are always coming up with really cool advancements to the tool so there are always more neat things that you can do with them!