Using Prezi: a novel tool for resident medical education
The task:
In-depth lecture covering Hemodynamic Monitoring of the Critically Ill Patient as well as Respiratory Support and Mechanical Ventilation Strategies.
The audience:
PGY-2 Anesthesiology residents.
The time allotted:
90 minutes.
My response: ARE YOU SERIOUS??
I had to figure out a way to provide a thorough, relevant, topic review of two of the most broad subjects within critical care to residents who were very early in their training and all within a relatively “brief” amount of time. Most importantly, the presentation had to be interesting enough for it not to seem overwhelming so I didn’t lose them halfway through. I shuddered to think how they would feel at the end if I hit them with a bullet rich powerpoint presentation reminiscent of my college and medical school days..Arrrghhhh! (truly Death by Powerpoint).
I needed something that can make them see the BIG PICTURE and not get lost in the details! I have always been a visual learner and I find that drawing my notes, sketching the connections and relationships among things really helped me understand complex topics. I needed a tool that would allow me to teach the way that I like to learn. This is where I found Prezi. Prezi is is a web-based presentation application and storytelling tool that uses a single canvas instead of traditional slides. Instead of presenting slides and bullets, the presenter can zoom in and out as well as pan across the canvas to visually present ideas. It allows the presenter to zoom out to show the big idea and the connections among things and when needed zoom back in to go over the details. Certainly, this is a visual experience much different than a traditional powerpoint presentation. This tool seemed like a perfect fit for me — so I gave it a shot. I recently posted these presentations to the site and they can be seen by clicking on the links below:
Positive impressions:
- very easy to sign up (used an educator account to signup which took a few minutes
- all the editing was done in a browser which made the whole process very portable. I used chrome and firefox without issues
- very easy to edit, create, embed images and create paths to fly around the screen
- **really made my presentation look and feel like the overview sketch I had created on a piece of paper to show the interactions / connections among topics**
- autosave and undo features are great!
- the file is saved on the prezi servers and anyone can access it — i could control it to be private or shared (needs to be shared to post on blog)
- i could download to my MAC (or a PC) to run as a standalone presentation — this was great for backup in case the website or my internet access was down — i found this a faster way to run the presentation since it relied on the speed of my Mac as opposed to the internet —i can see this being important for LARGE prezis
- presenting was as easy as powerpoint — used the arrow keys to move forward and back — also at any time I could manually control the prezi by using the mouse to zoom in /out and pan around — this was great in case of questions if I needed to go back to a specific point
- i was able to easily embed the prezi in this blog using the simple embed code
- definitely an overall coolness factor to the presentation
Negative impressions:
- I wonder if any of my audience members felt a bit “sea-sick” from the constant panning — there were a couple of times when i wanted to skip a section and clicked through it quite fast. This resulted in a rapid pan-zoom-pan-zoom that even i was uncomfortable with. I had no specific complaints afterwards fromt he audience but I think the presenters have to keep this in mind — what that means is allow the audience to adjust to a motion before moving to the next one. Talk a little slower and move from “slide” to “slide” a little slower
- The path tool which describes how the presentation moves along took a little tweaking – also I found it a bit confusing to go back to the path and change it around. In fact I had to trash the whole path a couple of times. Fortunately, its a pretty quick process so this didn’t add too much to the production time.
- AUDIO!!! this is going to be a big issue for all presenters who would like to make presentations available for viewing on a blog — a lot of us would like the ability to add audio to the presentation that essentially makes this a “prezi-cast” so that viewers online can follow along. Prezi does not make this easy. It only accepts flv/swf audio and adding it to the presentation is not the easiest thing since it has to be individually added in segments as it relates to a step in the path. Even explaining it is difficult for me. Other tools like slideshare make slidecasting very easy allowing presenters to easily add an mp3 file and add timing to it to correlate with the slides. Prezi is definitely behind the eight-ball here and needs to fix this issue.
Overall, I think Prezi is an excellent tool for medical education and it can definitely be used to turn linear (PPT) presentations into a non-linear (canvas like) format which can be visually appealing and allow the audience to really understand the BIG PICTURE first and then focus on the intimate details of the topic. Please watch my presentations and let me know what you think — would you use it to teach complex medical topics?
now you can visit anytime and have the same ease of use that you do from the computer at home or work. Enjoy!
