PowerPoint or ...

This week I was tasked with investigating alternatives to that ubiquitous presentation tool: Microsoft PowerPoint. I don't use PowerPoint everyday in my classroom, but when I want to organize some information visually for my students, chances are I am doing it with PowerPoint. Occasionally I have something that I want to easily share or allow others to edit, so I have used Google Slides. I like Google Slides, but it seems to be just an online PowerPoint (much as how Google Docs is an online Microsoft Word).

I checked out a few sites, that offered some alternatives. I thought Haiku Deck looked intriguing, and was about ready to dive in to the open source slide tool Reveal.js. Instead I went with Prezi. I knew about Prezi, and I had seen quite a few presentations given using Prezi. I liked that the slides could be organized in a visually stimulating way and things could be given more context than just "this comes after that." At first I was hesitant to try Prezi because I thought it was not a free tool. Luckily I had a colleague mention that they have a free plan available for educators. So I went for it.

I was happy with Prezi. They had some useful tutorials and some visually pleasing templates to start. It also seems like there are many ways to customize the presentations. There is a bit of a learning curve. I fumbled around trying to figure out how to get the presentation to zoom in on different parts. I tried adding new frames, which worked. Towards the end of my creation, I realized that there are tools that let me add my current view to the path. This will be useful for next time.

I made a presentation about some major parts of a computer motherboard for my Computer Science class. I used the Subway Map template, which actually worked pretty well as a flow chart showing how some of these parts connect with others. I may go back to this and place it on my own custom design that looks more like a motherboard, but it was still fun to mess around inside a template that already exists.

Here it is: Enjoy!