New Literacies Project

For my new literacies project, I am learning about Numeracy. The technology that I decided to use is called Prezi, which is available for anyone at prezi.com. I had never ever heard of Prezi before I started my project; I got the idea to use it from someone in class who had used it before. The easiest way to describe what a Prezi is: PowerPoint on Steroids. It presents your information in boxes or slides like PowerPoint, but it makes the presentation more interactive by zooming in on important facts and moving in all directions, not just left and right.
I have done quite a bit of work on my Prezi about Numeracy. I used the Wiki from class to obtain useful information about Numeracy. The real challenge was putting the information into the Prezi. I chose a template to make my experience easier, but it still took at least 15 minutes to figure out how to delete the sample text and put in my own text. It was also really difficult figuring out how to rotate the text to line up with the other text on the page. My presentation has boxes that are kind of crooked, so I had to use the tool that lines up the text with everything else in that particular box. It is extremely hard to get it perfect if you do not use that tool!
Once I figured out the basics to Prezi, it started to get easier. The hardest part was figuring out what all the tools did. I am so used to pinching the corners of the text box to make the text smaller or bigger, like in Word or PowerPoint, but in Prezi they use a little tool with a + to make the text bigger and a - to make the text smaller. It took a while to get the hang of it because I was so used to being able to make the text whatever size I want, but in Prezi they only have preset sizes you can use.
Overall, this has been a great learning experience. I would definitely use Prezi again in order to engage my students in something, but I think I need more practice first. For me, it is just so easy to present projects in PowerPoint because I know how to use it so well, but I know it gets boring seeing the same thing over and over. I think if I practiced enough, I would be able to use Prezi just as fast as PowerPoint. I plan to do a lot more work with my Numeracy project, so hopefully I will become an expert on Prezi presentations!