How to Entertain and Educate Your Audience at the Same Time

 
PREZI is a web-based dynamic presentation creating, editing, and viewing tool. Its ability to zoom-in and zoom-out makes watching presentations more enjoyable, allows timing with great precision, and, most importantly, it lets presenters to share context as well as content.

Here’s what I mean. In a normal PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, you skip from slide to slide sometimes using transitions. Usually the information on each slide is completely different which produces a kind of mental hiccup in the audience. PREZI on the other hand doesn’t switch between slides. It glides between them. Watching a PREZI show means you always know where you came from, where you are, and it’s easy to see where you’re going next.

The presenter, during the building stage, sets the views through which the audience will travel. You’ll see in the example below from a teleconference I did from my office to Sydney, Australia, that after each ‘section’ the presentation goes back to the overview. By zooming in and out, it’s easier to reinforce context, restate key points with greater comprehension by the audience, and to keep the flow going.

PREZI takes about a day to learn. The adding of text and images is pretty straightforward. Even setting the path for the presentations is easy. The hard part for most people is learning how to think through the presentation from the beginning the way you want your audience to experience it at the end. It turns out that the visual shape the presentation takes (1.2.3.4. below) is important to the main message you want to convey as a presenter. Often, that main message doesn’t reveal itself until you’re part-way in to developing the presentation, so you have to rework some things.

The first time audiences see PREZI they’re amazed. After that, they know what to expect and the excitement of a cool new technology wears off quickly. What remains, however, is still a wonderful tool for collaborating (two people can build a PREZI at the same time) and for getting the big picture and the details across. You’ll see as the presentation below runs through how zooming in and out helps the viewer to think through the connections between the concepts at the high (zoomed out) and detailed (zoomed in) levels.

You can use PREZI for free on-line. If you want portability (i.e. work on your laptop during a plane flight) you need to purchase the stand-alone player. It comes on an annual license for $159. Well worth the investment in my opinion.

 
Here’s the Customers for Life presentation twice. The first time lets you pan and zoom freely. The second iteration is a straght forward-and-back metaphor. Both options are available without any special coding. Just grab the embed code from the presentation you wish to include from the PREZI.com page.
 

PAN AND ZOOM VERSION

 
 
FORWARD AND BACKWARD ONLY VERSION