Prezi- A good tool or a huge distraction?

Prezi- a now well- known member of the presentation world, while fun to watch and even fun to create, is not necessarily the best presentation tool.

When it comes to giving a presentation, many people will go directly to PowerPoint and get working. With other presentation tools in today’s technologically advanced world such as Keynote, Google Slides, and Prezi, why is this?

Prezi gives the creator of the presentation the ability to move around one great big “canvas” by zooming in and out and panning around while still letting you include pictures and videos rather than moving from one slide to the next like other tools do. If this is true, how come it is significantly less popular?

The point of giving a presentation or teaching a lesson is to relay information to others and have them actually comprehend what you are spitting out at them. Now, I may be crazy, but if there are a million different transitions from one area to the next, along with zooming in and out of what you are looking at to then look at something else, I am going to be completely distracted. I am then going to change my focus from the information I am supposed to be learning to what is physically going on on the screen, not being able to remember a single thing that I just heard. Secondly, if I was the one giving the presentation, I think that I would be constantly checking to make sure the presentation is doing what I had it set up to do, rather than just being able to trust that it is going to move on to the next slide easily when I hit a button.

While I am sure that there have been great presentations done using this tool, I think that those presentations most likely keep the transitions to a minimum, putting the majority of the focus on the information being provided.