Using Prezi in Construction and Project Management Classes
Lecturers by and large make use of PowerPoint to give presentations. A typical approach would require the presenters to consider their audience, identify the presentation objectives and develop the presentation contents. Generally speaking, PowerPoint presentation is easy to prepare as it gives a fixed structure to explain issues according to the sequence of slides. Presenters can insert pictures and videos to give extra visual information and impact to the presentation. However, the delivery is largely restricted by the chronological sequence of slides. The visual aid for explaining complex idea or relationship is largely restricted. There are ways to make the presentations less linear such as the use of hyperlinks but it is constrained very much by individual skills and also the slide based structure of PowerPoint.
Every PowerPoint slide in the presentation generally serves for two and sometimes, three purposes. First, it acts as a reminder for the lecturer on what they are going to talk about. As a consequence, there is a tendency for the presenter to over-emphasise on words in the presentation. Second, it reinforces the spoken words. Apparently, if too many words are put in a slide, it is problematic as evidence shows that trying to have spoken and written words can easily overload the verbal channel (pictures and images appears to use a different channel). Third, the presentation file is often used as a notes to students which is fine for supplementary purpose. It is however not ideal especially if it is used as the only reference for revision as the structure and contents of the presentation is governed by the style of the presentation and time availability, and is not necessarily sufficient to facilitate learning of a subject.
Prezi is a cloud based presentation tool that is very intuitive to use. It is literally a zoomable canvas. Instead of putting contents as individual slides in PowerPoint, everything needed to be included in a presentation such as points, pictures and videos is put on a single canvas in Prezi. The presenter can then compose a presentation based on the use of a combination of the zoom in and out, and pan functions.
An extra benefit of a cloud based tool is its ease for sharing. There is no need to download anything. Students can easily read the presentation anywhere through a web-browser in any device. To create Prezi presentations, there are student and teacher licences which allow 500MB storage and the user can choose who to share their presentation with.
Franco Cheung, Department of Real Estate and Construction
Examples
Presentation for the Departmental PETAL project on Attendance and Engagement
Presentation for a class on Business Case in P33520 Opportunity and Risk Management
Resources
Notes for new Prezi users