We’ve talked before about TED Talk styled sermons, but what about TED Talk type presentations?
Can we have better church presentations? Something beyond your typical PowerPoint slide-show?
Presentation matters. It can be the difference between someone not understanding you and someone completely getting what you’re talking about. No matter how you cut it, if an idea or concept is presented well, you increase your chance of it being received well.
To borrow one of Jesus’ parables, if you present your message well, it could make the difference between a seed falling on dry soil versus good ground.
How Does TED Do It?
One presentation solution we’ve touched on many times before, is Prezi.
You can create online or off, work on a presentation yourself or collaborate with others, and then present from anywhere to everywhere!
We don’t expect pastors and ministers to be uber creative, so why are we letting so many of them build their own presentation slides? If we could get more pastors and teachers to use a tool like Prezi, they could finish their presentation and then hand if off to a creative type that could add some awesome to it! How great would that be!?!?
So what does this have to do with TED?
Well,
“In 2009, the founders of Prezi asked TED curator Chris Anderson for 18 minutes–the maximum length of a TED presentation–to convince him to invest in the collaborative presentation platform. He did, and Prezi became the first company to raise money from TED Conferences (as part of a $1.5 million fundraising round that also included Sunstone Capital).”
But that isn’t why so many TED presenters use Prezi. It actually has to do with how different Prezi is in comparison to other tools:
[tentblogger-youtube 4n7dP_NRZL4]
Prezi is built to work with the mind, not in a linear fashion like most other presentation apps.
Here’s the current pricing structure:
Considering how important good presentations are and how much other apps cost, this is priced really well.
Learn more on the Prezi website.
Do you use Prezi?
Tell us about it!
[via Fast Co.Exist]
Kevin at SiteWizard LLC says
I recently started using Prezi, but I’m not sure I’ll keep using it long-term.
PROS:
– Prezi does produce something visually interesting with a style that most people haven’t seen. Hence people don’t lose interest as quickly as with PowerPoint.
– If your presentation has a hierarchy, Prezi is the best way to explain your concept in a visual way. It lets you start with a “big picture” overview, then zoom in to explain details. It is a neat way to group related ideas under a larger story.
– It is great for storytelling, especially if your story is a journey (either a physical journey, or a journey of growth / knowledge).
CONS:
– There is a very limited library of pre-designed graphics available in Prezi. This library needs to get much bigger to be useful for the average user. By comparison, PowerPoint has a very large selection of clip art built in, with more available on the MS Office website.
– There are no drawing tools in Prezi. Plan on creating all of your graphics in PhotoShop or elsewhere. I found myself using PowerPoint’s drawing tools, then exporting my illustrations, then importing into Prezi.
– Prezi lacks even the most basic transitions / animations for objects. The only option available is a fade-in effect. If you want to keep items hidden then appear, you can only fade them in, or move the camera to a different area of the canvas.
– The slideshow timer isn’t customizable, i.e. you can’t set different times for each slide or transition.
– The Prezi equivalent to a PowerPoint slide is called a “frame.” I found the frame system to be very frustrating. For example:
(1) It is hard to get the perfect aspect ratio (matching the size of your frame to the height/width proportions of your screen). The frames are hand-drawn, so you can’t be sure whether something important will get cut off, or if Prezi will show other parts of the canvas outside of your frame.
(2) It is difficult to keep consistent sizing. When you add something to the canvas, its default size depends on your current zoom level. I found myself needing to copy-paste frames to ensure that I got the same frame size, object sizes and font sizes each time.
(3) Changing or deleting a frame is a precarious process. There is no mechanism to tell Prezi which objects are part of your frame and which are not. So if you move a frame, any objects caught between its borders will also move. Same gotcha if you resize a frame. Worse yet, if you delete a frame, any contained objects are gone. Good luck if you have two frames that overlap, or a frame inside of another frame.
Prezi recommends the following workflow: Import all of your image objects onto the canvas, then play with organizing them into groups, then add frames. This would be fine if frames weren’t such a headache, often messing up the content that you already organized.
I tried to follow their recommended workflow. After adding all of my image objects, I repeatedly found myself placing a new frame, then not being happy with its placement or aspect ratio. Using any other software program, you can drag the borders of the box to fix the problem. Unfortunately, in Prezi you cannot change the aspect ratio of your frame after it is drawn the first time. You get one try – love it or delete it.
If you attempt to alter the frame, you end up resizing the entire frame and all of its contents (it keeps your mistaken height/width ratio). So then I would have to hit “undo” to fix my contents’ size, then I would try to delete the frame. That’s when Prezi would delete everything inside my frame (not just the frame border itself).
I eventually figured out that you can delete a frame without deleting the contents. You have to zoom to an appropriate level, then click the very outer rim of the frame (which is challenging if you drew a “borderless frame”), then select the tiny menu tag, then select delete from that menu. This is not intuitive at all, but you’ll learn the lesson after doing it 200 times.
So in summary, Prezi was an interesting experiment. I think some people will love it simply for the visual appeal. Plus once you get used to its quirks, the tool isn’t that bad to use. However, I was personally frustrated with the lack of graphics and drawing tools, and I spent a lot of time undoing and redoing work. I’m probably going back to good ol’ PowerPoint next time.