7 Ways to Use Prezi in the Classroom

Heard about the coolest presentation building software in town? And no, it doesn’t include double “P”s. Prezi is forcing teachers, businesses, motivational speakers, and other presentation-givers to forget about a world where the MS PowerPoint was the only tool to use for creating classy presentation.

Prezi is quite unique in the way it offers users to build memorable presentations and bring ideas to life. All you have to do is pick a template, add your content, and then give your best presentation ever.

Teachers can find this tool very useful for engaging students in even the most boring topics. A visual and engaging “prezi” is bound to commit your lessons to their memories. Need some ideas? Here are 7 ways you can use Prezi in the classroom.

•  Present a Topic: Your Prezi could cover a not-so-interesting topic by making it more compelling with the help of strong visuals in Prezi. You may also include other media such as YouTube videos and bring a lesson to life.
• Present Historic Figures: Prezi is unlike traditional presentations that move slide by slide. With Prezi, you can have an “infinite canvas” that allows you to zoom in and out. This will work great for social studies classes where you want to sum up the contributions of a variety of famous figures. To find out more about each historical figure you can move in and out of picture to display more information.
• Spark Debates: How can a Prezi allow you to spark debates? With the help of the Venn diagram feature in Prezi you can show two sides of an argument with the help of pictures, text, or questions inside the circles. You can also edit this during class. This is much better than writing groovy essays on argumentative topics.
• Teach Students to “Sell Themselves”: Whether in graduate school or high school, it is a teacher’s duty to show students how to “sell themselves”. You can come up with a fun activity requires students to create wonderful Prezis all about themselves and why someone would want to hire them. So, this can turn into a presentation, come resume, that promotes their skills, qualities, ambitions, etc. The most creative ones should be rewarded!
• Take a Quiz: Have you ever thought of presentation quiz before? We’re sure you probably haven’t. This will require teachers to start out with a question and let students write it down before it switches over to the next question. If you’re not looking for a seriously challenging quiz, you can simply prezent the answer right after the question has been answered by the students.
• Reveal their results: Anything that promotes competition is a great way to engage students. With Prezi you can use cute avatars and reveal who came first, second, or thirdin a competitive activity you had in class. Each time, the students consolidated marks, comparison with the average, and the total marks could be shown. There are so many ways you could get creative with this!
• Cover Topics to be discussed: This is something every teacher has to present every once in a while. It can be very boring for students to follow or take any interest in what’s “coming up” next. However, with the help of Prezi, you can present semester outlines in a unique way. Each topic can be given individual attention and include visuals to make it even more interesting.

There’s really a million ways you can creative with Prezi for educational purposes. Just put your mind to it, and you’ll come up with tons of brilliant ideas that could make use of dynamic features.

Happy teaching!

Author Bio:

Christina Matthew is an academic from downtown LA. She offers academic consultancy to junior and high school students. When not consulting, she works in quality assurance for an online research firm.

Bangladesh - A safe country for living and visiting

Historically Bangladesh endures the reputation of maintaining peaceful law and order and communal harmony that enable the country to make the safest comfortable place for living. Year after year the nations of the country are struggling hard to protect this reputation of safe coexistence of native people with different religions, colors, races and castes along with peoples from abroad. No conspiracies can ever deviate people of the country from this attitude of respecting coexistence safely and happily. It is really very tough for the nation of a densely populated country like Bangladesh with people of multi religion, race, caste and color to maintain peaceful law and order with a view to make the country a safe place for living and visiting. The valiant country friendly but easy hearted nation can claim to the world community as proud contributors for introducing the country as one of the safest places for living and visiting in the world.

World community has come to know about Bangladesh’s new identity as one of the safest places in the world by two recently published reports. Gallup the Washington DC carried out The Global Law and Order 2015 report presents that Bangladesh is one of the safest countries in the world.  The report says that Singapore with 89 points is the safest country in the world followed by Uzbekistan (88) and Hong Kong (87). The worst ranking countries are Liberia with 40 points and Venezuela with 42 points. Bangladesh with 78 points is one of the safest countries of the world, according to the Report. Bangladesh is closely followed by the United States and Australia with 77 points. France, the recent epicenter of global attention, was ranked lower than Bangladesh with 75 points. Apart from Bangladesh the ratings for other countries of South Asia were not particularly inspiring with India scoring 67 points and Pakistan 60 points. Gallup’s report presents the results from its latest measure of people’s answers to following three questions, based on more than 142,000 interviews with adults in 141 countries in 2014.

·        In the city or area where you live, do you have confidence in the local police force?

·        Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where you live?

·        Within the last 12 months, have you had money or property stolen from you or another household member?

On the other hand, Institute for Economics and Peace carried out Global Peace Index (GPI) that measures the state of peace in 162 countries. GPI report shows that Iceland is the most peaceful and Syria is the least peaceful countries in the world. Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh registering gains in ranking compare to last year ranking. The position in ranking of Bangladesh is 84 while Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan’s positions in ranking are respectively 114, 143 and 154. GPI considered indicators like Population, CO2 Emissions, National police personnel (per 100,000 residents), Traffic deaths (per 100,000 residents), Assaults (per 100,000 residents) and Life expectancy (in years) for ranking & scoring the 162 countries.

But a few sporadic incidents can never futile achieved reputation of the country. Compare to other countries even developed countries in the world we feel proud in terms of maintaining peaceful law and orders with insignificant numbers of law & order enforcers. Hardly people of the country face political instability in the forms of violence, rampage and vandalism. But it never long lasts. In a densely populated country like Bangladesh with inadequate numbers of law & order enforcers incidents like rape, assassinations, killings, rampages etc happen in very few numbers compare to developed countries in the world. Only patriotism, humanity and attitude of respecting people enabled to maintain peaceful law & order despite of having lesser resources compare to huge number of people. Even the most developed countries like USA, South Africa can never claim proudly to consider the countries as the safest places for living and visiting as crimes, rapes, killings etc committed frequently and regularly.

The premiere reasons behind developing Bangladesh as world’s one of the safest places for living are strong family bondages, trustworthiness in brotherhood & neighborhood, respectfulness to others’ religions & cultures etc. Despite of having huge number of peoples with different religions and more than forty-five ethnic minorities, peoples here are living peacefully. Harmonize coexistences has become possible because people here do believe the spirit of “Religions are for individuals, but festivals are for everybody’s”.

The Global Law and Order Report 2015 and GPI Report 2015 revealed the fact to the world community that Bangladesh is one of the safest places for living and visiting despite of raising unjustified debates regarding this issue by some countries very recently. Every citizen of the country must aware to protect the reputation and justify the authenticity of the aforesaid reports presented by Gallup and Institute for Economics and Peace.

MD Bayazid Khan

auparbayazidkhan@gmail.com

The writer is working for primary education in Bangladesh and from 2017 will take on the role of Country Co-ordinator in Bangladesh for Educate the World [UK]