After far too many hours, my digital story in Prezi is finished and posted to the Story page of this site. All in all, it was quite a lot of fun, which is likely why I committed so much time to it when I should have been working on my Moodle course.

The biggest time suck for me was trying to get an understanding of the audio options in Prezi, which I found to be completely counter-intuitive. You see, I had created what I thought was a nice little track using Garage Band, all I wanted was to add it to my presentation, and I imagined that this would be a simple insert function.

But no such luck.

Prezi gives you two options to insert audio: import in flv format if you want it to play during a specific portion of the presentation, or in swf format if you want it to play in a continuous loop throughout the entire presentation.The observant among you will note that neither flv nor swf are audio file formats; they’re movie formats. That’s when the pain started.

Am I looking in a mirror?

Being the tenacious learner that I am (okay, stubborn goat may also be a fitting description), I tried a bazillion things to get my little mp3 into the swf format that would let it loop through my story. I tried both iMovie and Movie Maker to create a “movie” consisting of one image and my track; I clipped and mangled my poor track in attempts to make a seamless loop; I exported the movie into different formats; I converted the movie (after finding and downloading the least-sketchy-looking free converter application I could find) into swf and inserted it into my story, but the looping effect was always poor. There was always a crackly gap between loops.

Then, during our Wimba session, John made a comment that reminded me how annoying it is when something plays automatically, and I finally came to the realization that a musical background was NOT a good idea. I wanted students to zoom around, look at the images, and watch the embedded YouTube clips; I was so stuck on figuring out the HOW? that I forgot about the HOW COME?.

For me, this activity was an effective way to develop my skills both in Prezi and in media creation and (repeated) manipulation. But perhaps more importantly, it was a vivid reminder of how easy it is to lose sight of the purpose behind your teaching choices.

Kathy