Collaborative Prezi Presentations

It’s time for the Wednesday Website suggestion!! For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. You can download my E-Book of Websites for the Elementary Classroom for free from Teachers Pay Teachers or Smashwords, or, you can check back here each week for the Wednesday Website suggestion.

Have you missed me?  My internet at home is down (freak out right?), and has been for 2 weeks!  The only internet company in Morocco – Maroc Telecom, keeps telling me that it will be fixed tomorrow, in’shallah (God Willing – in Arabic).  There are some challenges to being stationed in Morocco, lol!  However, this internet hiatus has given me some more planning time for resources I need for next year (Like Problem Solving Path for 2nd and 5th grade – coming soon!)  Anyways, I’m camped out at a café while my kids are at gymnastics, so I thought I’d take some of my gloriously appreciated internet time to share my kids’ latest project with you. 

We have just finished up our study on Ancient Rome, which was a glorious 6 weeks, but which went WAY too fast!  (By the way – stop by Global Teacher Connect to see pictures of our field trip to the Ancient Roman ruins in Rabat, Morocco.)  In order to cover so much information in such a little time, I decided to have my class “jigsaw” the information.  I broke the class into 5 groups, and assigned each group a topic from Ancient Rome to research:  government, economics, travel, technology and family life.  Feel free to download the research sheets from Google Docs.  Each group had 3-5 question to answer, books and these websites: 

Then, each group went onto Prezi and added to a collaborative presentation that I created.  Here is a look at their work:

If you haven’t used Prezi yet, you have to check it out!  These online presentation tools are so much better than Power Point, giving you a great variety of transitioning tools, fonts, images etc.  Plus there are some added benefits, like:

- cloud storage – every presentation is stored online and is available no matter what device you are on

- easy video streaming – videos can be put in your prezi and used simply, without having to worry about having a video in one location and your Power Point in another

- collaboration – each Prezi can have up to 10 collaborators, each being able to work at the same time as the others.  My students LOVED seeing that studentX was also logged in and what they were doing.