EDTECH 513: Project #4 - Prezi Deck

This week for EDTECH 513 we had to use Prezi to prepare a presentation based on the assigned text book reading/s.   I decided to cover the redundancy principle for my presentation.  The main point of the redundancy principle is to reduce unnecessary items in the design of the presentation so as to not overload the visual and audio channels for learning.  This is a common mistake many developers and presenters make when designing presentations.  As per the redundancy principle the excessive use of text on screen can cause the learner to focus more intently on what is presented on the screen.    Therefore reducing their capacity to fully absorb any narration or auditory information because the brain is having to process the redundant information on the screen and can't incorporate the narration into it's processing.
In designing this presentation I mapped out the script I wanted to use as the narration for the presentation.  Based on the narration I mapped out the key steps in Prezi to represent what is being discussed in the narration.  I wanted to challenge myself by not including any text on the screen other than the name of the presentation to really see how well the redundancy principle can work.  The biggest challenge I found was finding appropriate graphics to represent the content.  Prezi had some cute symbols so I decided to use these instead of trying to find external images. Normally I would use PowerPoint and I would have created the graphics from scratch.   But for this exercise I wanted to stick to purely using Prezi.
I liked Prezi because it did force me to think more intently about how to represent the narration using graphics.  The animation between each of the steps is engaging however, I did find it frustrating thought that there were very limited editing options.  I would've liked to have the ability to incorporate animation into each of the steps in Prezi.  This would've allowed me to introduce different parts of each graphic as it was discussed in the narration.  Prezi would be a great tool if you were designing a presentation to show the different components to a graphic such as a computer program or technical systems.  It seems to allow the user to access any step in the presentation and not force them to follow a sequence.  For some presentations, especially if this was self paced, I would want to have the option to direct the learner through the training.

Link to:  Effective Learning using the Redundancy Principle