Prezi

If you are bored with powerpoint, your students probably are too. Prezi is an online tool that allows users to make presentations that are incredibly visually appealing in far less time than it would take to create a basic linear powerpoint. And it's even free for teachers and college students.

But of course there are a few downfalls. It does not work as well with Internet Explorer as it does with Chrome and Opera. There are only a good handful of presentation styles to choose from, and within each style, only about two fonts: one for titles and one for content. And it does take some getting used to. The first hour you spend on Prezi will probably be a combination of frustration and wonder. But in that first hour, you can make a prezi that's cooler than any powerpoint you ever dreamed of. Here's the first prezi I ever made. It was for a Spanish class last year when I compared a book I'd read with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I guess it doesn't make a whole lot of sense without my Spanish lecture that went with it, but at least you can see what I was able to do in 45 minutes with a program I'd never used before. Pretty impressive, huh? And that's nothing compared with the stuff people do when they really know how to work Prezi. This one is still pretty simple, but it's a great introduction to the program. Explore Prezi and then let me know what you think of it!

Oh, and I forgot to mention that if you don't have time to make a Prezi of your own, there are thousands of public ones that other users have made available, and the majority of those are educational. Nice.