What makes them good

1. Short, meaningful information: it doesn’t have paragraphs of text that compete with the spoken presentation
2. Something that the audience can relate to–something appealing

Engages the audience
Strong relationship between the presentation materials and the supporting AV: keeps the focus on the central message
Reliability: help convey believability, doesn’t detract from content of presentation
Strong relationship between form and function: the materials suit the topic and help to make it more accessible

What our guidelines are

Using the tool as it was intended
Manipulating tool to do what YOU want it to do, not what it tells you to do
Facts: diagrams, charts, data in appropriate (easily understood) formats
Simplicity: ease of understanding–form and content match
Sound, if appropriate
Video, if appropriate
Creativity–creates connection to the presentation
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The group presentation we did in-class on Wednesday was challenging, due to the fact that, I had no prior experience using Prezi.  In the past, I used only Microsoft PowerPoint to develop my presentations.  Prezi is a very good tool which provides more options to developing a presentantion whereby you can add pictures from the Internet in a very efficient way by using the ‘insert’ tool and I am really excited about being introduce to it.  The little time that was given in class to practice using Prezi, as a group we were able to create a very good presentation.

For the first time, i tried using a new presentation interface. Prezi was a wierd and unusual experience for me. I am one of those users, that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I usually use Microsoft Powerpoint for my presentations. In Prezi, the outline and format was confusing. The frames and objects were all over the place. People say that powerpoints are simple and boring and usually have a lot of writing. I like the their format better because its easy to just place objects and text and go straight to a new slide. While the visual on Prezi looks better because everything is seen in one frame and you know what to expect, you can have enough ideas on one slide in powerpoint, then go to the next one. It was alittle tough organizing our ideas on Prezi because we were new to this concept. In powerpoint, you can move slides with the click of a point. This presentation wasn’t a total loss. My group and I were able to have good visuals and we learned to try something new.

The short group project that we did in class on Wednesday wasn’t easy because the time was limited. So we had to decide really fast what the best ideas we should include in that presentation. But overall it was really great exercise because we used new presentation software called Prezi. We chose Prezi because it looks better to us and we think that the display layouts that are available for the presentation are very interesting and there are many different options from which users can choose. For me Prezi is more professional and advanced than the PowerPoint.

The presentation exercise in class was very interesting. The process of putting the presentation together based on our room for debate topics was a fairly difficult task. Our group had difficulties choosing tittles for the frames of our prezi presentation. Another area in which we ran into trouble was acquiring visuals that related to our topic or represented ideas in of our topic. We also had a hard time deciding if we would include more pictures then writing or more writing then pictures. Overall putting the presentation together in the short amount of time we had was very hard.

After working with Prezi on Wednesday, i learned something new from which i am really happy, and i feel like this will be something that, i will use in the future. We didn’t really had much time to prepare our presentation, so everything was in chaos, thinking about what to write about, choosing our theme from Prezi, and learning it from begging. We chose it over the other presentation, because it looks better, and in my opinion if it is used correctly it can make audience more interested in presentation.

Today in class, each group was assigned to work on a presentation within a small amount of time. As a member of my group working on “College Rankings” topic, I did enjoy the experience while giving my participation to the work that had to be done.

As we worked on the presentation, by using Prezi, we found some difficulties. Many of us are basically used to Power Point. A short tutorial was shown in class, but it was not enough for us to start using Prezi right away.  We still had to learn more about some details from it since it is new to us. We had to figure out how to use some basic features that could take us few seconds to achieve if we were using Power Point. Fitzpatrick and I spent more then 5 minutes figure out how to make a sentence in bold, center it then make it in a bigger font. We finally left it in a very simple way and moved on since the time was very short.  As a result, must of us did not finish what we started to work on.

From this small presentation, even though the groups did not get to the ending point as planned, I still learned a lot of things. This experience made this morning, on a simple presentation, makes me feel the pressure that even professionals are experiencing when working in-group or individually in a very small amount of time. Few examples would be the people who work as movie crews, also those working in television or radio stations. This experience was very worth and interesting to me and also  helped me understand how difficult things-that may appear to be easy for some people –are.