Thursday, 9 April 2015

Week #5: Reflection 4

Group 3 Tools

Present/Mashup/Collate

This week we focussed on tools that facilitate the presentation of information. Three tools were recommended: PowerPoint (ugh! so boring!), Prezi (sounds like a whacky version of PowerPoint), and Glogster (you lost me at scrapbooking). To be honest, I thought I was a fairly proficient user of PowerPoint. When completing the engagement activity however, I explored some of suggestions in the technical manual and was quite surprised by the possibilities I had never considered; PowerPoint isn’t so boring after all!  Glogster was completely new to me, and although I found its features pretty cool, I find it hard to work in such a non-linear manner.  I decided to focus my attentions on Prezi, somewhere in between my comfort zone PowerPoint and the totally crazy Glogster.

I started out by signing up to Prezi, which was amazingly simple (and free!).  That was a win already. I soon discovered that Prezi is essentially a non-linear version of PowerPoint.  There were some basic templates that were very useful, and gave me ideas about how I could present my information. I could still structure and plan my information and the general experience (I always write outlines for any sort of presentation/training session etc), but then I needed to find a logical but interesting way to flow the presentation. 

A feature of Prezi that I really appreciated was how easy it was to share the Prezi, and the number of options that were available for sharing; I was able download a copy to my desktop at no charge! I am a linear thinker/learner, and even I began to see the benefits of having an interactive and unstructured way to let students explore a topic in the sequence in a way that makes the most sense to them.

SAMR Applications

I found producing this week’s SAMR quite difficult, as this tool is so similar in concept to PowerPoint that I found myself stuck in a bit of a thinking rut! I’m looking forward to seeing other peoples SAMR for this Group to help me broaden my horizons!


My Prezi


Below is the Prezi I have created.  I chose to do an introduction into the IUPAC naming convention for organic chemistry.  This is the most challenging tool I have used so far.  I think this was because of a combination of being rusty on subject content, and being a linear thinker I kept just wanting to put things in linear steps.  The challenge certainly wasn't in actually using the tool, it is quite intuitive to use. I've made a commitment to myself to use Prezi at least once more in my blog this semester to make sure I get the hang of it!


- Isabel -

References:

Prezi Accessed: 06/04/15. Retrieved From:

MindMup Accessed: 06/04/15. Retrieved From:

A Brief Overview of Learning Theory. Accessed 13/03/15. Retrieved from: https://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/page/view.php?id=15608

1 comment:

  1. Hi Isabel
    Totally agree with how user friendly Prezi was, could only hope other ICT tools take some notes from their ease of access.Looking at other students blogs really helps open up your mind to other thoughts and ways of looking at things. I hope you find some help on the SAMR for this tool.
    Cheers Patrick

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