Rudaí 20 – Presentations

Apart from running information literacy workshops for my students, I don’t usually have to present data that often. In the past I had always used Powerpoint and then about 5 years ago I was introduced to Prezi. I thought it was such a different way of presenting the information from the usual slides in Powerpoint.

Prezi was a whole new playground for me – I had been looking for a way to change the style of presenting information as I felt that my Powerpoint slides were stale and not very exciting. Setting up an account with Prezi was easy although getting to grips with all the various options took some time. They have good help tutorials and a whole community of users that you can ask questions of.

The topic I chose to try out on Prezi was about Evaluating Information Online – usually I just gave the information in a handout but this time I wanted to try present the data on the screen.  I spent a long time trying out a lot of options for putting the information into a Prezi presentation but finally I was happy with the end result.  Now I just had to use it in my next information literacy presentation to the mature students …  It didn’t go as well as I had hoped.  The students just wanted to get a handout on the topic at the end of the session and some of them even commented on the fact that they felt seasick watching it!  Not quite the reaction I was hoping for.

On reflection I can see that I lost sight of my audience’s needs in my enthusiasm to embrace this new presenting style.  I have now gone back to my tried and trusted Powerpoint but have made a few changes keeping in mind that the less you mess around with colour, backgrounds and animations the better – keep it clean and simple and it gets the message across.  Recently however our campus has changed direction and we have 17/18 year olds instead of mature students so it may be time to look at Prezi again as a way to present information in a more visual format – but this time I will keep the story and my audience in mind!