Techno Tuesday: To Prezi or Not to Prezi?

In the past three years, I have begun to utilize several of the Apps that Google offers: Drive, Photo, Docs, Slides, and Sheets.  I love that I can access my Google Drive from my computer, iPad, and smartphone. Google Slides has come in handy when I have had to put together a workshop or give an Ignite Talk to my colleagues.  I love that I can just login to my Google Drive and not have to worry about writing myself multiple reminders on post-it notes so I will remember my USB drive.  I have a lot of love for "The Cloud" and for Google's Apps.

My group and I are preparing for a presentation where we will talk through the items we selected to purchase for our imaginary Makerspace Inventory.  The platform we have been assigned to use in the creation of this presentation is the ever popular Prezi.

As we assembled our Prezi, I found that I was pining for Google Slides.  There is not much of a learning curve in navigating how get started because of the handy “wizard” that walks the user through the initial stages of creating the presentation.  The simple and straightforward interface of Google slides makes it easy to navigate.  I consider myself to be fairly tech savvy and found Prezi’s interface to be confusing and frustrating.  I found myself watching several YouTube videos so I could figure out how to use Prezi.

Prezi’s organizational system for the presentation feels circular to me.  I prefer presentation layouts that are linear.  I created an outline for our presentation in a Google Doc to help us get our Prezi organized because I was feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with Prezi.  Another reason why I resulted to creating our outline for our presentation on a Google Doc was because Prezi makes it impossible for those with a student account to communicate with their collaborators.  In order to use the comment function on Prezi, the user must purchase a business membership.

The biggest annoyance that I encountered with Prezi is that they do not have the option to make the background of an imported image transparent. At first, I put the images into PowerPoint and made the backgrounds transparent.  I saved the images as .PNG files then attempted to import them into Prezi. I found that this method was unsuccessful. I researched transparency tools and learned of one called “Clipping Magic” which is a paid subscription. In Clipping Magic, I had to upload the images and manually remove the white backgrounds from each of the pictures then download each image as a .PNG file in order for the image to maintain its transparency and integrity on Prezi.  In the end, I spent close to two hours and $10 to get over twenty imported images to be transparent on Prezi.

I thought that Prezi could be a contender but given the amount of money and time I spent on this presentation, my verdict is not to Prezi. #GoogleAllTheWay