Animoto
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Animoto takes photographs and allows users to add sound and text, as well as control some editing of the video project, in order to share stories through a short video presentation. Students will find the ability to express themselves through new media tools an attractive aspect of Animoto, and teachers can utilize this tool as a way to bridge curriculum and student engagement or develop digital storytelling projects. For students and teachers tired of PowerPoint presentations, Animoto is just as easy to use and provides a wider multimedia experience.
Pre-planning is a helpful first step in creating your video project. Gather all images and video clips and save them in a desktop folder. If a particular soundtrack serves the needs of the project, make sure the sound clip or song is in .mp3 format. Finally, on a piece of paper, sketch out the storyboard for the video—in particular the placement of text in the video. Animoto offers a handful of different account types that vary in price from personal to business. The "Professional" account priced at $22/month ($264/year) is the most common and offers HD quality videos, more than 25 professional fonts, and pre-built storyboards.
After users open an account, the first step is to upload photos and videos via three options: from files on the computer, from Animoto's own collection of photographs, or from another website. Uploading images and videos from the computer allows users to select multiple files and conduct a batch upload. Once images and videos are uploaded, users can click and drag images at will in order to construct a desired sequence. Other features allow users to spotlight certain images or videos for a more focused display during the final presentation, add text slides, rotate and/or duplicate images, and delete any unwanted selections. It is worthwhile to note that one of Animoto’s biggest drawbacks is the limit placed on text entries. Text restrictions may prove to be frustrating for users, but one simple way to bypass these limits is to create a PowerPoint slide with the desired text, save that PowerPoint slide as a .jpg image, and then import the file as a picture into Animoto. Step two directs users to add a music file, or soundtrack, to the video either through Animoto’s own selection of songs or your own .mp3 files. Users can also select at which point the music begins. The final step is the editing process and finalization, where users can establish the speed of transitions, the design template, and select whether the video is short (30 seconds) or full length. After all selections are made, users go to the final section where the credit information is provided for the title of the video and the creator(s). Here is where Animoto users will find a second frustration: once everything is ready to go, users select “create video” and the process of finalizing the video can often take quite a while. Nevertheless, Animoto emails video creators once the video is finalized . . . so you don’t have to wait around. (Update: Animoto’s site updates may have fixed the speed delay in finalizing videos.)
Teachinghistory.org used a quick mock-up video at the 2011 AHA conference to show attendees how five simple images can tell a story. Other video examples include The American History of Chocolate, The Great Exchange, and Civil Rights.
Animoto’s website, as well as their education page.
USA Today’s blog TechnologyLive looks at the updates and improvements of Animoto.
Review an abstract on "Animoto and language acquisition in the classroom." İrgin, Pelin and Yildiz Turgut "Using Animoto for Language Education" The International Journal of Learning 16 (2009): 1-8.
LucidChart
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Many links and hints and tips and tricks find their way past my screen on a daily basis care of Google Reader, Twitter, and email exchanges with teachers. One day last fall, this video featuring LucidChart came to my attention. The simplicity with which the tool was used to create organization of ideas to tell a story resonated with them as an option for communicating complex ideas in a visual manner. LucidChart identifies itself as “the missing link in online productivity suites.” The web-based, clean interface allows for the collaborative creation of diagrams and flowcharts for publishing. I recommend this tool as fast, easy to learn, collaborative, and functional on any browser.
Registering is a breeze, needing only a valid email address. I created a flowchart in LucidChart to detail the steps for getting started with the tool. Many of the boxes are hotlinked—run your mouse over the textbox, and if a hand appears there is a link to explore. (Make sure you have popups unblocked to view the included links.) The tour, examples, forums, and tutorials are appropriately helpful and clear. If you believe that this is a tool that would suit your educational pursuits, there is an educational version that is available free of charge to K–12 teachers and students. For the more tech-savvy, there is also an integrated function between Google Apps and LucidChart. In an email exchange with David Grow of LucidChart he stated,
“For K–12, we are committed to always providing LucidChart free of charge so there is no expiration. Also, an educational account is essentially the equivalent of a paid Team account which has all of the premium features! We are eager for more teachers and students to be using LucidChart.”
I cannot stress enough that with a tool like this, it will take you a bit of time to feel as though you are a “master,” but you can feel functional almost immediately. The drag-and-drop-style features make it quite intuitive. I created the Getting Started flowchart to demonstrate my own willingness to create and play a bit in the pursuit of encouraging more teachers to do the same.
Quite traditionally, my American Government classes work through the three branches of government in their investigation of the American political scene. For the study of the Executive Branch, we look intently at the complex bureaucratic structures developed over time at various levels of government. I find that students often think that the Executive Branch is just the president or governor or mayor, but fail to consider the elaborate web of bureaucracy that the Executive Branch oversees. The end-of-unit project is based on the understanding of a selected bureaucratic “task.” The goal of the project is for the students to actually pursue the task by assembling and filling out paperwork, making phone calls, reading . . . reading . . . reading, and asking questions. At the end of all of it, the partnerships present the body of evidence with the paperwork, but also with a flowchart that details the process by which the average citizen would complete the task. They are to add in links, tips, tricks, hints, and such. At the completion of the project the students had to not only analyze the complex structures of government bureaucracy, but also produce a “deliverable.”
LucidChart was one of the best choices of tool for this task because of its simple, web-based, collaborative functions. Being able to investigate, research, create, and then present/publish their findings meant that the learning was not just a creation for in-class sharing, but could be shared digitally and hence more broadly. One of the most functional tasks chosen by the students was completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). As seniors, they are all in the midst of applying for college and now for financial aid. The students that worked on FAFSA were able to share their flowchart with their peers in order to demystify the process a bit. Much of students’ reflection commented on the complicated nature of the processes and the struggle they had to attempt to simplify the procedures down to a flowchart. As a teacher I was able to see the level of research and clarity of understanding in the graphics they produced on LucidChart.
Student Examples:
Union or Secession: Virginians Decide
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Created by the Library of Virginia as part of its Virginia Memory project, this website lets visitors explore the events leading up to and immediately following Virginia's secession from the Union on April 17, 1861. Short essays and more than 200 primary sources, including newspaper articles, speeches, letters, prints and drawings, official documents, maps, and other materials, present the story from a variety of perspectives, including those of women, African Americans, and people both pro- and anti-secession.
The website is divided into six different sections, each providing a different way of approaching the content. “Virginians Decide” divides Virginian history from the beginning of 1860 to July 1861 into 12 chronological sections, covering events including the 1860 presidential election, the meeting of the Virginia Convention of 1861, the formation of West Virginia, and the entrance of Virginia into the Civil War. Each section features a 300–500-word essay introducing the topic, accompanied by 5–45 related primary sources, links to the biographies of related historical figures, and 1–3 more short essays looking at aspects of the topic in greater detail. “Explore” lets visitors search all of the site's primary sources by 11 themes (Business and Economics, Convention of 1861, Elections and Politics, Journalism, Making West Virginia, Military, Restored and Loyal Government, Secessionism, Slavery, Unionism, Women) and seven geographical regions.
Visitors can get to know more about the people in the sources in “People.” Forty 400–2,500-word biographies give overviews of the lives of journalists, members of the Convention of 1850–1851 and of 1861, members of the Wheeling Convention, politicians, ministers, escaped slaves, free black businessmen, writers, army officers, slave traders, and others. Each biography includes related primary sources and links to related biographies. “Timeline” lets visitors browse sources arranged on an interactive timeline covering 1849 to 1862, and “For Educators” includes four downloadable lesson plans (on John Brown and the Fugitive Slave Law).
Of special interest to educators is “Callie's Mailbag.” This section gathers together 22 letters sent to a young educated Virginian woman, daughter of a secession-sympathetic Campbell County family. Callie Anthony was in her early 20s when she received these letters, which date from Dec. 1859 to Jul. 1861 and come from relatives and friends, expressing a wide range of pro- and anti-secession views.
Scanned documents and images can be downloaded in high resolution, and transcripts of written and printed documents are also downloadable. A valuable site for anyone teaching Virginian Civil War history, or wanting to give students a closer look at tensions in a seceding state.
Virginia Memory
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A project of the Library of Virginia, this website makes many of the library's resources available to the public in digital form. Most resources in its digital collections relate to Virginia history, making this a treasure house for educators teaching Virginia state history.
"Digital Collections" contains the bulk of the site's content. More than 70 collections document aspects of Virginian life and politics from the colonial era to the present day, and include photographs, maps, broadsides, newspaper articles, letters, artwork, posters, official documents and records, archived political websites, and many other types of primary sources.
Topics include, but are far from limited to, modern Virgina politics and elections; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting; World War II photographs; Works Project Administration oral histories; the 1939 World's Fair; World War I veterans and posters; the sinking of the Titanic; stereographs; the Richmond Planet, a 19th-century African American paper; Civil War maps; official documents related to Civil War veterans; religious petitions from 1774 to 1802; letters to the Virginia governor from 1776 to 1784; Dunmore's War; and official documents from the Revolutionary War. Collections can be browsed by topic and title, and are internally searchable using keywords and other filtering tools.
Other features on the site include the "Reading Room," "Exhibitions," and "Online Classroom." "Reading Room" lets visitors explore a primary source for each day in Virginia history or browse a timeline of Virginia history. There are eight essays on unusual sources in the library's collection as well as on new finds in the library's blog, "Out of the Box."
"Exhibitions" preserves 25 exhibits on Virginia history topics that accompany physical exhibitions at the library. "Online Classroom" orients teachers to the site with a short "Guide for Educators," suggesting possible uses for the website's resources, and offers four source analysis sheets and 30 Virginia-history-related lesson plans, all downloadable as .pdfs. The section also highlights two online exhibits designed to be particularly useful to teachers: "Shaping the Constitution," chronicling Virginians' contributions to the founding of the country, and "Union or Secession?", which uses primary sources to explore the months leading up to Virginia's secession in the Civil War.
An invaluable resource for educators covering Virginia state history, this website should also be of use to teachers covering the colonial period, the American Revolution, and the Civil War generally, among other topics.
Zinn Education Project
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Created by the nonprofit organizations Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project works to bring resources exploring the “role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history” into the classroom. Inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn, author of the popular A People's History of the United States, the website provides teachers with materials for expanding on these historical narratives.
“Teaching Materials” contains the bulk of the site's content, including more than 100 teaching activities. These can be downloaded in PDF form following free registration, and include essays, articles, interviews, and full lesson plans on topics related to marginalized groups and labor history. Titles range from “Exploring Women's Rights: The 1908 Textile Strike in a 1st-grade Class” to “What the Tour Guide Didn’t Tell Me: Tourism, Colonialism, and Resistance in Hawai'i”.
“Teaching Materials” also contains more than 300 annotations on audio resources, fiction and nonfiction books, films, posters, commercial teaching guides, websites, and Spanish/bilingual resources. Annotations consist of 2–3 sentences describing the resource and its relevance to Zinn's focus and classroom use.
“Teaching Materials” can be browsed by date (either selected on a timeline, or chosen from 16 time periods, ranging from “Colonialism” to “20th Century” ) or searched by one of 29 themes, five reading levels, or by type of material (teaching activity .pdfs, audio, books: fiction, books: nonfiction, films, posters, teaching guides, websites, or Spanish/bilingual).
Useful to teachers wanting to expand on the traditional textbook narratives on marginalized groups and labor history.
Scribblar
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Scribblar is designed to be an online collaborative effort that empowers users to develop and maintain a scholarly conversation at any time. Several tools are optimal for the use of the online whiteboard, while the audio and text messaging features facilitate collaboration among users. This is an ideal tool for groups of students and teachers to brainstorm and plan outside of class hours, but with some forethought Scribblar also has the potential of being used as a virtual classroom.
The first step, once activation is complete, is to create a room and set privacy stipulations (an important consideration for school policies). After setting up the room, users arrive at a blank canvas—a plain whiteboard. The menu items on the right include a pointer/selector, various geometric shapes, and writing tools: drawing, text, highlighting, and stamping. Also to the right is a microphone button to start an audio conference and a space below for text messaging with other group members. Horizontal buttons along the top include the usual word processing and photo editing features: cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, delete, flip horizontally and vertically; additional tools include lock, unlock, clear page (and all pages), take snapshot, equation editor, shared pointer, page background (with numeric color value), and page draw mode. At the bottom of the screen, users can select line color, fill color, and line thickness. To write on the whiteboard, users can either use the text button or the pencil button for freestyle writing. Shapes can be brought to the front for layering purposes, by right-clicking the object (text or shape).
In many ways, Scribblar merges the skills of word processing with the purpose of whiteboard instruction and planning. Users can also build graphic organizers easily and the "alpha/wolfram" button, in Beta mode, has potential for future social studies table elements. One limitation, however, is that all operating features are controlled through a mouse or trackpad, not with the keyboard. In addition, an "arrow" button is missing and currently users would use a pencil button. Another limitation fails to make the best use of the Web's potential: hyperlinks, interactivity, and multitasking tools/features—which classroom tools such as SmartBoard put to good use—are underdeveloped in Scribblar. Flip horizontal button does not seem to work well, and some objects can't be flipped vertically or horizontally. Lastly, text font options only number between 9‐12 fonts (serf and non-serif) with bold, italics, and underline buttons, while the stamp tool is limited to six options. The current version of Scribblar is perhaps of better "curriculum" use in a math classroom than a history classroom. Still, the ability to import images, such as maps and graphs, help Scribblar serve effectively in a social studies classroom if careful planning takes place first. For example, in the right section (where the list of participants is listed), under the assets tab users can click on the "+" to add a feature or image (file types: PowerPoint, .pdf, .jpeg, .gif, .png—maximum file size is five MB.) Users can also download a file and decide whether to add the item to the whiteboard after upload is complete (only the first five pages of a PowerPoint or .pdf file will be converted in addition to pictures, maps, and other visuals . . . but not audio or video files). Other features in the assets tab include adding a webpage snapshot (it takes about a minute to appear in the "Assets" panel; it is worth noting, however, that adding a webpage snapshot as a background may produce a repetitive image that can be fixed by resizing the target window and then re-taking a snapshot). A great feature is the ability to add a Flickr image because you can search online and immediately paste to whiteboard as an item; also useful are the abilities to create a numeric list for ranking, to use the snapshot button in order to preview the whiteboard in an html window, and to print the whiteboard by right-clicking canvas and selecting the print option. In all, Scribblar offers great potential for online collaboration, planning, and teaching. Classrooms separated by distance would benefit greatly, as well as inter-disciplinary collaboration within a school. Most importantly, Scribblar extends learning outside of classroom hours and is thus well positioned to provide teachers and students flexibility and an online pace for increased engagement in the history curriculum.
Video tutorials on the Scribblar site provide interested users with some examples of how Scribblar can be used for collaborative planning and teaching.
Stop Action and Assess Alternatives
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Stop Action and Assess Alternatives is a method for teaching students to think of historical events as contingent. They unfold from conscious decisions made by the involved parties who use the information available to them at the time of these events to make those decisions.
History is often presented as if things happened as they were supposed to happen. Yet with most historical events, there might have been any number of possible outcomes. At critical junctures, the people involved in the events made choices and acted in particular ways based on their values, their roles in the event, and myriad other factors. Using the Stop Action and Assess Alternatives technique helps students to discover that there is always more than one option when deciding what to do and more than two sides to every issue. Through a historical event—such as the Cherokee Removal example discussed below—students see that the involved parties were agents in what happened rather than passive observers.
After gaining background information about a particular historical event, which may come from the textbook or other sources, students analyze the historical event through primary source documents dating from the event’s critical junctures. The parties to the event are identified for students: in the example of the Cherokee Removal, these include Cherokee Indians, the State of Georgia, representatives of the U.S. government, and the media. The students are given documents one at a time that explain various incidents leading up to the event’s outcome. For example, students examine newspaper clippings, transcripts of parts of speeches, and an excerpt from the Supreme Court decision regarding the breach of a treaty between the Cherokee and the State of Georgia. After each document is read and discussed, students are asked to consider the options each constituent party had available to them at that moment. This Stop Action and Assess Alternatives pattern continues until all the documents have been read and discussed. The technique also can be used with such issues as the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, the Immigration Act of 1924, and the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As with the Cherokee Removal, multiple parties were involved in the decision making for these events and there were critical and distinct moments when decisions had to be made. These qualities lend themselves to the use of this technique. Stop Action and Assess Alternatives should not be used for events such as the outbreak of wars or economic transformations where timelines are too long and multivariate to be adequately addressed.
- Research the topic and get a sense of the different players in the event. For the example of Cherokee Removal, sources are listed below.
- Choose primary source documents, from the varying constituents’ perspectives, to mark critical junctures as the event unfolded. Primary sources, including images, can be found at the Library of Congress’s Primary Documents in American History and at its American Memory site.
Ideally, students would receive three or more parties’ perspectives for each juncture along the way to the event’s culmination. However, this is not always possible. For example, with the Cherokee Removal lesson described below, there are multiple documents for some dates but only one document from one constituency group for others. It is important that students receive only the primary resources from the date under discussion. Students should not receive all sources at once.
- Review the historical context of the event. For the conditions prevalent at the time of the Cherokee Removal, these include prevailing attitudes about non-whites among the white population; population pressures in the East and farmers’ and ranchers’ desires to expand their holdings; pressures on Indians to assimilate into white culture by converting to Christianity, building and attending schools, etc.; the institutionalized “theft” of Indian lands; and treaties formed between the Indian Nations and Great Britain and, after independence, with the American and Georgia State governments. Background reading for students can come from their class textbook or from Bradley University’s Trail of Tears website.
- Explain to students that the Cherokee were forcibly removed from their land in 1838 and that how the situation got to that point is the day’s lesson.
- Group students by constituency groups:
- Members of the US government on all sides of the issue,
- Members of the Cherokee nation on all sides of the issue,
- The State of Georgia, and
- Members of the press.
- Be sure that students understand the nuances of the Cherokee Indians’ positions. For example, while there seems to have been unanimous opposition to the removal in the early years, some of the tribe’s leaders later changed their positions to favor removal but only as a means of ensuring the tribe’s safety.
- Hand students the documents that pertain to the first critical juncture and have them read them aloud, group by group. Once these are read aloud, Stop Action and have students Assess the Alternatives open to the constituent parties. Keep the students historically honest; ensure that the alternatives they come up with for each party would fit with that party’s positions thus far and with what they know about each party’s values and desires.
- Students may come up with positions for the constituent party they are representing that would be historically inconsistent. However, it’s important to remember that, in the case of the Cherokee Removal, not all Cherokee agreed on what action to take at every juncture; minds changed as new information was acquired.
- There is a tendency to view the press as unbiased when in fact it has always been biased. Moreover, the press frequently takes a position and attempts to convince readers of that position.
- Stop Action and Assess Alternatives is not a debate; student discussions should be within, not between, the constituent parties. Once a group has reached agreement on a proposed course of action for a given date, the group reports its decision and the other groups may discuss their reactions to the decision but should not debate the decision between the groups.
To my first students, whose passionate desire to learn about Native Americans led me to learn more.
Ghere, David L. and Jan F. Spreeman. U.S. Indian Policy, 1815-1860: Removal to Reservations: A Unit of Study for Grades 8-12. Los Angeles: The Organization of American Historians and The Regents, University of California, 2000.
Perdue, Theda and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995.
Prezi
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Prezi is an online Flash-based presentation tool that allows users to either develop structural pathways, or employ a non-structural approach, on a single digital canvas. Images, text, and videos are placed on the canvas and grouped in frames that come in multiple designs; canvas template designs also vary in styles and colors for intended audiences. Users can zoom in, and zoom out (either manually or by the determined pathway), and the importance of items in the presentation can be determined by the sizing of elements. Prezi offers a variety of plans ranging from basic free services, tiered packages (which offer extended features such as increased storage capacity and the ability to work off-line), and an educator's license for educators and student projects.
The first step is to make sure that all Internet requirements are met before enrolling in Prezi. After you've decided which plan works for you (students are fine with a free basic plan; teachers and students should take advantage of the "EduEnjoy" plan), you will begin with a pop-up window where you can create a title and description for your project. While tutorial videos can often be long and of little value for web-savvy users, Prezi's tutorial videos—found in the Prezi Academy section—are excellent, succinct, and definitely worth viewing before playing with a new canvas.
Orienting yourself with the various menu options is another useful step before working on your presentation. In the left corner, you will find several options and tool options: Write (default tool), Frame, Path, Insert & Shapes, Show, and Colors & Fonts. The top bar menu allows users to save as needed, undo or redo an action, print, exit, seek help, and also facilitates collaborative efforts through the "Meeting" functions. The buttons on the right of the screen allow users to zoom in and out, as well as return "home" (which provides a long-lens snapshot of the entire canvas).
As you begin, you may want to head over to the Colors & Shapes tool and select a design template with specific colors and font styles; the Theme Wizard provides additional personalization options for colors and fonts, including the ability to insert a logo that will appear throughout the presentation. To insert text, begin with the Write tool and type; you can resize text by extending the textbox and position your text with the options at the top. Before selecting "OK" to finish your text, you will want to decide whether the text will follow the design options for a title, subtitle, or body. After finishing your text, click on the object and you will see Prezi's unique features appear as striped options in a bulls-eye design. The outer ring allows you to reposition your object diagonally, while the center ring allows you to drag your object to any location on the canvas. The middle ring is perhaps the most useful feature because users can click, hold, and drag out (or in) to resize the object. The sizing of objects on the canvas provides users a simple and easy-to-edit way of prioritizing elements on the Prezi canvas.
Inserting images and videos is fairly simple. Most files are acceptable in the Load File tool—.pdf, jpeg, mp4, mp3, etc. In addition, any video on YouTube can be easily inserted through the YouTube tool and the Shapes feature allows users to insert arrows, draw freehand, and use a highlighter.
Before determining your presentation's pathway, Prezi's strength as a visual medium is the ability to group objects on the canvas using the Path tool. In this regard, Prezi breaks away from the constraints of other tools like PowerPoint and functions much like a graphic organizer that moves, zooms in and out, and embeds multimedia elements. (Note that users can, however, upload preexisting PowerPoint presentations to Prezi.) After creating text, inserting images, and framing/grouping elements on the canvas, the final step is creating a pathway. Although some users might prefer to present without any pre-determined structure, the ability to create a determined path is useful in Prezi because it allows the presenter to go “off” the pathway at any moment (and for any duration) and on the next click (or right arrow button on the keyboard) the presentation resumes where the presenter left off. Whether a user follows a pathway, or uses the canvas much like an iPad canvas, Prezi facilitates a back-and-forth dialogue between presenters and the audience.
Prezi's site offers numerous examples since projects are developed and stored online. For a history classroom, the immediate value of this tool is the ability to embed all the multimedia of a presentation in one space—instead of toggling between windows or tabs on a browser. Additionally, the ability to download your finished Prezi to a desktop is an added value for those unfortunate moments when the school's server is slow or not functioning.
It is worth noting that Prezi does offer limitations. Font and color selections are limited (although a manual feature for selecting colors does offer options on an RGB scale), and design templates are too few to offer the personalization that teachers, and particularly students, seek in a presentation. Another hassle is that the Theme Wizard feature erases any previous personalizations every time you select this tool, including any logo previously imported by the user. Likewise, the Frame feature only offers three designs (and an invisible fourth option) and the Shapes tool could benefit from offering shapes found in most other programs: geometric shapes, curves, call-outs, word balloons, and various other forms of arrows. A last word of caution is that if a Prezi project is not structured carefully, audiences might feel vertigo with the zooming and panning features (but the tutorial videos address this matter fairly well).
Despite these limitations, Prezi offers teachers much more than what it initially appears to be: a fancy PowerPoint tool. By allowing presenters to collaborate online, leave and return to established pathways during a presentation, and embed multimedia tools, Prezi offers a much more exciting presentation for an audience. The ease of grouping items is a useful tool for teachers who want to model graphic organizations, as well as a helpful medium for students to display their cognitive process as they tackle historical questions and investigations. The infinite canvas style is also appealing because it frees creators to go wild with their imaginations. For the teaching and learning of history, Prezi's features offer a way to plan, construct, and present historical topics in a multimedia manner that applies digital tools in a Web 2.0 collaborative fashion.
Visit the Prezi website, follow the tutorial videos, and explore some of the projects online.
Check out Prezi EDU for teacher and student-created Prezis.