Finding French Food
50 Ways to Tell a Story was a fascinating (and very useful) way to explore various Web 2.0 tools available. The consistancy of the “Dominoe” story easily allowed navigation through the tools with the clear ability to see goals and possibilities in each tool.
After perusing the many Web 2.0 tools, I first decided which tools I would avoid, such as those involving cartoon drawing skills as I realized this was outside of my realm of interest or capabilities. I let the presentation outline I had created and images I had collected from the Creative Commons largely guide my choice. I aimed to create a story about my experiences with food in France as a way of introducing myself to my students, exploring food from another culture (part of the Grade 10 curriculum), and demonstrating unique means of putting together a presentation that they could explore through one of the class projects.
My choice of Prezi was based largely around these goals but also around previous experience in the MET program. In other courses I had already used a variety of programs including creating a Wiki, Photopeach, MySlide, Slideroll, xtimeline, and others but was interesting in exploring a new tool that would allow for a bit more flexibility in applicability of my story and to my classes. I had seen Prezi being used in one of my MET courses as a mechanism for controlled presentation and was eager to explore the program.
Prezi allows for the narrator to control the presentation, if desired, and since the story I had chosen was based on a creative presentation of my experiences, I wanted to guide the viewer through the story I had created. Various programs allowed for a self directed collage or a slide show, image after image, approach, but I wanted a combination of these two effects: I wanted to guide the viewer but not in a stale right-to-left or up-to-down approach.
I had become frustrated with various slideshow presentation tools that I had used as they were extremely deterministic of the final product. Prezi easily allowed for an individualized presentation which fell outside a basic slide-after-slide approach to story telling.
The ease of use of Prezi was surprising! The ability to enlarge, embed, move, rotate, etc was astounding. I can say that I have never before used a program that was both so user friendly and user applicable at the same time. I happily clicked, dragged, copied, pasted and inserted with unprecendentedly low stress levels in dealing with a new program. And to make it even better, Prezi also offers impressive free of charge packages to educators and students, packages which allowed for privacy protection and working offline.
While I created my Prezi presentation, Finding French Food, I realized that the Prezi tool was having an affect on how I was creating my story. If I had used an audio tool, or had written the story in a blog, it would have been much more text based. The focus of my Prezi is a combination of short sentences, sentence fragments, and random words which work alongside the images to create a feeling for my experiences. The words need the images to retain a depth of meaning and the images need the words for the same reasons. The Prezi format allowed me to place equal weight on words and images (something many slide show programs do not allow as they favour subtexts), something I aimed to create in a digital poem of words and images to convey the meaning of my story.
The Prezi did, however, dicate the amount of text which was reasonable. I chose the Prezi based on these needs, searching for a medium to create an image-word poem. The Prezi was perfect as it would invite the word limitations I searched for, and was unlike a Wiki or text based Weblog. BAsed on the story I aimed to create, the Prezi tool was ideal as too many words would become cluttered and images shared centre stage in the creation process and end product realized.
My Prezi Story, Finding French Food, can be found by clicking on the story name or following this link:
http://prezi.com/0qbkz0j78g91/finding-french-food/
I hope you enjoy it! Bon Apetit!
~~Caroline~~