Tech Tools in Use: Prezi

Over the semester, different groups from my class have been presenting on different tech tools and their uses in the classroom. One of my favorite presentations was about an awesome tool called Prezi. In my opinion, Prezi is an "exciting" version of PowerPoint. It zooms in and out, and flies all over the page, but still can hold the same information and pictures as PowerPoint can. I have used Prezi before for a couple presentations, but I had never really considered how it could be integrated into one of my future math classrooms.

One really cool thing that I learned from the presentation, which I had never even though about before, is that people publish their Prezis on the web for other people to use. If you search "Math classroom Prezi" or something to do with teaching math and Prezi you will get to see other Prezis that math teachers have made! Some of them are really great, and this is an awesome way to save time, or to have an extra tool to show when teaching on a certain topic.

One of my classmates, Jeni, was talking about how she would integrate Prezi into her science classroom by using it to show procedures on how to do labs. This inspired me to think of all of the different procedures that we teach in the math classroom. Could I make a Prezi about the process of solving a quadratic equation? Factoring a polynomial? Finding the x-intercepts on a calculator? Yes! And so much more. There are Prezi templates that are even set up in such a way that it's quick and easy to fill in the steps of your procedure and voila.

I think that creating Prezis on how to do different functions on a calculator would be incredibly beneficial, especially for the students in my current placement. They often have trouble remembering how to do different things on the graphing calculators, such as entering an equation, graphing it, looking at the table, and finding the intercepts. Handouts that list the steps of these procedures are good, but the students often lose them and aren't interested in reading through the steps. With a Prezi, though, we could keep them all in one location online, and include pictures that show exactly which buttons the students should be pressing. I think this would help them out, and I believe they would find it more interactive and enjoyable than the usual handout.

My only issue with using Prezis as resources for the students to go back and look at when they forget a procedure is the issue of access, again. If students don't have computers or internet at their houses then it's a little hard for them to log on and re-watch these presentations. I guess think is an issue I will have to think about further. I'm interested in looking more into how other teachers use Prezi in math classrooms and whether or not they have experienced issues with access inequities or not.