We’re happy to share another great success story featuring Prezi: Andrew Jackson, a teacher at Hitchin Girls School in the UK won the “outstanding teaching resource of the year” award issued by the Times Educational Supplement, a British national award that celebrates the best in teaching within the UK. He introduced his submission in Prezi and believes that Prezi helped him create someting that stood out from hundreds of nominations from around the country. We asked Andrew to share his experience using Prezi as an education professional.
How did Prezi help you create an award-winning presentation?
Prezi helped me create something different and to make my work stand out – as well as being ideally suited to my subject material. I first saw a prezi around 12 months ago and imediately saw its potential within education for creating interactive content. Prezi allows me to produce an interesting and dynamic presentation of my work. However, more importantly, it also allows students to review the work we did and to show their friends what they learned through an embedded version in our school website. The additional wow factor that people experience when they see a prezi for the first time also no-doubt helped to impress the judges.
I use Prezi regularly in my day-to-day teaching job. Not for everything – but whenever I want to review a topic or I want to work on many ideas that are connected I will use a Prezi – I find myself loathed to return to PowerPoint!
What is the student reaction to learning with Prezi?
After seeing the masterclass, many students have set up their own Prezi accounts to do their school work – they find the ability to work on a canvas and to “impress” their teachers with something better than a PowerPoint really useful.
What is the most important Prezi best practice you would share with other educational professionals?
DON’T use Prezi like a PowerPoint – you can equally produce a “death by prezi” presentation with loads of text – my award-winning prezi has very little writing and lots of images. There is also great power in screencasting your work – I have screencasted my astronomy prezi onto youtube with great success.
Andrew is also very active on our community discussion forum. If you start an interesting topic or ask a question, he might jump in under the nickname “AJ” and share his thoughts with you.
We’d like to give a big thanks to everyone who participated in Prezi’s June Prezumé contest. We received many awesome entries. By a total of 263 votes, the winner of the free one-year Pro license is a freelance multimedia producer from the Philippines, Charity Jayne Temple. Congratulations! Check out her cool sumbmission:
As part of the interview process, each prospective employee of Prezi is asked to make a prezi of a resume – and so the term “prezume” was born in November 2009. On the Prezi Explore page, you can find a nice collection of prezumes and portfolios.
Do things look different in your editor than last time? That’s because Prezi developers are constantly designing new features to make your Prezi experience better. We have started to log new features as they are released in one dedicated article on the Prezi Manual page. Whenever you see something new in your editor, just open this article and you will find screencasts, step-by-step walkthroughs, and descriptions of new features.
Now you can group items together in your prezi – using Frames.
How to group items within frames:
1. Add items (text, images, videos) to the prezi canvas
2. Select a frame to draw around the objects
3. Move/scale/rotate the frame and its contents together
4. To remove an object from a frame, drag the object out of the frame at any time.
OR:
1. Draw a frame on the prezi canvas
2. Drag and drop any object(s) (text, images, video) into a frame to group the objects with the frame
3. Move/rotate/scale the frame and its contents together.
To turn grouping off and move/rotate/scale the frame without the contents, Alt + Click on the frame. Note: grouping is not available with hidden frames.
You can also resize frames by double-clicking on a frame to see the four control points, and dragging the control points to change the size of the frame.
Prezi’s community on Facebook is growing quickly! At this moment, there are 25,699 people who have liked our official fan page. To keep the buzz growing and let more Prezi users join the great discussions, we are starting a mini contest. We’ll randomly select a winner from our entire fan base (Facebook users who like the official Prezi page) when the number of likes reach a specific milestone. Each winner will get a Prezi prize. Here are the milestones and the prizes:
Milestone 1: 26,000 likes – Prezi T-shirt – winner: Thiago Ximenes
Milestone 2: 27,000 likes – Prezi T-shirt + Pro account free for 6 months + personal support - winner: Nancy Lin
Milestone 3: 30,000 likes – Prezi T-shirt + free Pro account for 1 year + personal support + introduction on the Prezi blog. winner: Jeong Min Lim
Rules:
1. To be eligible to win a Prezi giveaway, you have to “like” our Facebook page. We will select winners randomly from people who already liked the official Prezi facebook page after the number of fans reach a milestone.
2. Fans who “liked” the Prezi page before the launch of this contest are also eligible to win.
3. Everyone eligible to win can only be selected as winner once during this contest.
4. In each phase of this contest, after a winner is randomly selected we will announce the winner’s name here on the blog and on our official Facebook page. To claim your prize, contact zoltan.radnai_at_prezi.com.
Earlier this month we had the chance to visit the eBay user experience research labs in San Jose, CA by the kind invitation of Elissa Darnell, Director of Site Wide Design at eBay. Elissa guided us through the labs, where they record how eBay Marketplace customers use the site, than process the information and work with development on improving user experience. Elissa and her team use video and voice recording and also eye tracking, a method that uses colorful data visualization to reveal how user’s eyes explore a website.
Prezi User Experience Researcher Laszlo Laufer sharing thoughts with Elissa Darrel on optimizing websites and web based products for the best user experience.
To be able to navigate easily on the website and use editor features most effectively, the Prezi team also does eye tracking to test what users notice first, which parts they skip and what they look at for the longest time on the website. We also perform lots of “think aloud usability tests” to evaluate every feature we develop. This means that we invite people to our Budapest and San Francisco offices, drink a nice coffee and play around with new, unreleased features and website updates. Our findings help us to keep the smile on our user’s faces when they work with Prezi.
Eye tracking test on Prezi's front page
It’s fun to work with Prezi. When I work with Prezi I always listen to music. I never listen to music when I work with Powerpoint – you can tell: these reports are music to our ears, but we are just as interested to learn about problems and weaknesses of the tool. And just like Elissa and her team at eBay, we channel our findings to the product management, development and design team. A video recording made by Prezi’s User Researcher, Emelie Hammar shows a focus group session in our SF office. (The video is published with the consent of the participants. Thank you Lisa (gotGeneaology.com) and Nikolas for participating! ).
Do you agree with what our users say about Prezi in the video above? We’d love to see your thoughts in the comment area!
Even though it became a tradition to celebrate Prezi’s birthdays at Moloko bar Budapest, this year we found ourselves thinking about moving the party to a bigger venue next time. If you wanted to say cheers to the team, you might have had to do it from the sidewalk because the bar was full.
It’s not only the number of celebrating friends and employees that grew fast during last year. As Prezi CEO Peter announced at the party, we have recently passed 3 million registered users! One of them, a Japanese Prezi fan, Shigeto Miyamoto even scheduled his holiday to the Budapest birthday party. It turned out that he was a board member of CyberTrust Japan, a security certification giant, which Verizon bought a few years ago and he was very excited to evangelize Prezi in Japan.
Unfortunately most of you couldn’t attend to the party in person. We just want to let you know that we feel your love and support (and see it on our community channels).
While people celebrated us at Moloko last Wednesday, we raised our glasses and said Cheers, Skal, Prosit, L’Chaim, Kampai, Egészségedre! to all our users around the globe!
Gensler Architecture’s San Francisco office works for companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Nokia. When hired to create or rethink work spaces, Gensler’s process is to learn about the company’s culture first, then – in line with that – they introduce personalized design plans. One of their current projects is the complete redesign of Facebook’s new office campus in Menlo Park, CA. Gensler uses Prezi to introduce their plans and thoughts to decision-makers at Facebook. Design Strategist Randy Howder told us how they use Prezi, and why Facebook managers love the tool. Read the rest of this entry »
You can use arrows and lines to make your prezi story easier to follow. Based on your feedback, we have updated this feature.
How to draw straight lines, resize and bend lines and arrows:
1. Draw a line or arrow and double-click it.
2. Drag the control points on one of the edges to resize length / move edges on the canvas
3. Drag the control point at the center of a line or arrow to bend it
4. Set the thickness of lines or arrows using the Zebra’s middle ring
Also, you can save a lot of time by cropping your images right in prezi without using any third party editors to set up your photos before loading them to your prezi.
How to crop images:
1. Double-click on an image to see the four control points.
2. Drag control points to select the part of the image you want to keep.
3. Hit Enter or ESC to crop the image; or, click anywhere outside of the image to crop.
Notes:
1. Cropped parts are not permanently cropped, they are just hidden. Double-clicking the image again will let you show the entire image, enabling you to crop again.
2. To crop an image, it must be at least 10×10 pixels in size.
3. You can crop JPG, PNG, PDF, and SWF images.
4. You cannot crop SWF animations or movies.
A Prezi remote controller for the iPad, a search feature for the editor, a funny frame shaker which makes your prezi content dance around, and a new office wall art installation were the results of the 3 day long Prezi Hackathon event organized in our Budapest office this spring. By genre, a hackaton refers to an event where developers come together to hack on what they want to, how they want to – with little to no restrictions on direction or goal of the programming. In our interpretation it was a bit different since Prezi team members and friends could work together on any prezi related projects they wanted to. We are happy to share the results after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re happy to share another great success story featuring Prezi: Andrew Jackson, a teacher at Hitchin Girls School in the UK won the “outstanding teaching resource of the year” award issued by the Times Educational Supplement, a British national award that celebrates the best in teaching within the UK. He introduced his submission in Prezi and believes that Prezi helped him create someting that stood out from hundreds of nominations from around the country. We asked Andrew to share his experience using Prezi as an education professional. 
