Online presentations are a great way of providing students with the opportunity to develop their presentation skills. And I'm not just talking about creating PowerPoint-like presentations, but of presenting and discussing by using audio and video. Some uses for this can be:
- Create online presentations or discussions around slideshows, screenshots, pictures, music, or video (of a study trip, works of art, an idea, a political cartoon, an experiment, football game tactics, a trainee teacher's class, and so on)
- Introduce students to each other by showing some of their photos, work, and/or videos (or to critique their own work)
The advantage of this kind of presentation is that we don't need to be at the same place at the same time to make this happen. Another advantage is that, using Moodle alone for this doesn't provide the same kind of flexibility and speed of use (we would have to use a forum, do a lot of uploads of multimedia elements, and all of this multiplied by the number of students).
In our course, the context for using this tool will be a final course event, where every student will have to present their best works in 20 slides, with only 20 seconds to spend talking about each (their colleagues will have to comment on them, too). This presentation format is called Pecha Kucha, and started in the young designers' world as a way of showing their works in an efficient way. The 20 x 20 format allows a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds per person, which is enough time to show important stuff.
Prezi (http://prezi.com) is a presentation tool that allows us to produce interactive presentations in an easy way.
After we sign up for a free account, we have 100 MB of storage to create our Prezi presentations. To start a new one, we just have to click on the New prezi button on the dashboard.
We will then be required to select a template for our presentation. We should select it and hit the Use template button.
We are then presented with an editing window, with a panel on the left, with several path points (what we call slides). Remember that, Prezi is an interactive presentation that moves around a path using transitions between slides, in a dynamic way.
In the provided template, there's a path already built-in, to which we can add our own content. In the first slide, we can add a title by clicking on the Click to add Title text.
In the second slide, for example, we can add our title, and insert a YouTube video, using the Insert option in the top menu:
Using the option Add Voice-over to Path Step #2., we can narrate our Prezi presentation too. There are other options available, that we can use according to the type of assignment we want to show our audience (PDF, Image, Diagram, and so on.)
We can also add collaborators to our Prezi presentation. Under the Share button, the option Share prezi... allows us to add by e-mail, people who can also edit the presentation.
To make an online presentation, where our audience sees in real time, slide by slide, what we are showing as a presenter, we should first save the Prezi, and hit the Exit button.
We are then taken to the presentation page, and we should hit the Present online button.
We are then presented with a link we should post in Moodle, and we wait for the audience to show up.
Also, notice the Embed button at the top. We can use the provided code to embed our Prezi presentation in Moodle.