Resource of the Week #115: Prezi Presentation Software

[Below is a guest post from Alejandra Arreola-Triana, whose work includes Spanish translation for AuthorAID. Thank you, Alex! —BG]

I will be teaching scientific writing next semester at my university, and as part of the training I received a course on Prezi.

Prezi is presentation software that lets you “present your ideas on a virtual canvas and arrange them in a natural flow” instead of using traditional slides. This software’s distinctive feature is the ability to zoom in or out of the picture.

I found Prezi very easy to use. Its website contains many tutorials to help you make and improve your presentations. Prezi also lets you share presentations with your colleagues. As promised, it let me give my presentation a more natural flow and a more distinctive format.

However, Prezi has some disadvantages. If the zoom feature is used too much, the presentation can be overwhelming. Also, the files for Prezi presentations tend to be larger than those for similar PowerPoint presentations, and Prezi presentations require more computer resources to run smoothly. And because Prezi is an online platform, you must be connected to the Internet to edit your presentations. (You don’t have to be online to present them; a portable Prezi can be downloaded.)

You can get a free license at www.prezi.com. This license lets you make presentations and gives 100 MB of free storage; all your presentations, however, will be public. For a small fee, you can get a license that gives you more storage space and lets you have private presentations. If you have a university e-mail address (.edu), you can take advantage of special promotions for teachers and students.

Prezi’s website states that this tool can help people remember your work and ideas. But remember, just as in a research paper, format is important, but content counts most.