I am creating a presentation on Prezi, the online Presentation tool, and gearing the presentation towards teaching how to use Prezi to collaborate with other people and groups in making professional level presentations. Cloud computing has given the World the ability to collaborate and share information at a level never before seen. Taking advantage of those opportunities both in the classroom and in the workplace will be vital to keeping up with technological advances and paradigm shifts in whatever areas of concentration. Prezi is a great looking, streamlined presentation tool that acts as an idea web for brainstorming and a powerful presentation tool that can use audio/visual media as a method of information sharing and presenting. Some things that I have learned during the beginning stages of implementation during this project can be seen below.
Formative
Thus far the implementation of the program has gone smoothly for the most point. I needed to gain more experience with Prezi in general before I could really teach the technology as a collaborative tool, but once I sat down and explored the technology for 2 hours, I found my grasp of it was strong and teaching it would not be difficult.
Summative: Evidence of success in addressing the problem of practice
The problem of practice for me was the fact that collaborating on projects in my experience can be quite difficult coming from the perspective of a recently graduated college student. Working around peoples schedules and busy lives often leads to people missing group meetings, differences in workload, etc. After working in Prezi and learning the software well, I have discovered its real usefulness as a collaborative tool that could easily be used outside of the classroom to create professional presentations for inside the classroom. Collaboration can be done on Prezi in real time through chatting and real-time editing, which addresses my problems well. Contributors can be invited from anywhere and contribute as long as they have an internet connection.
Approach How would you approach another project of this type differently given what you’ve learned here?
I felt that my approach to the project was well done and thought out. I initially came up with the problem of collaborating online to benefit groups of busy people with busy schedules, and then thought about a possible solution from there. Prezi came to mind because I have seen a few presentations and they were remarkably well done and professional looking, and after talking with people about them I was told that it is relatively simple and easy to create them and collaborate with them. One thing that I would have done differently would have been to learn Prezi before I started the project to see if I could use and liked to use the technology. I choose Prezi quite quickly without doing any research and it worked out for me in this project, but next time a will do some more research on my tool of choice.
Lessons
When it comes to teaching technology, tutorials need to be dumbed down as much as possible so that people at all skill levels can understand and implement the knowledge that they are learning. If someone only understands a fraction of vocabulary, technology jargon, or other such aspects, their understanding and eventual learning of the intended skill will suffer. This can be especially possible when TPACK is brought in to the equation. Understanding Pedagogy as it relates with technology and content is often not the easiest thing to do, which is why specificity should be a large concentration when integrating TPACK.
Changes
I have done many presentations in the past and have found a good recipe in doing them that works for me. I choose a problem first and then a technology to fix that problem. I think that when it comes to technology, the opposite method where you first find a technology and then figure out a way to use that technology to solve a problem could also work as well, which I would definitely think about doing.
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