Learning and Leading - December 2012/January 2013

The Prezicast was a challenge for some. For example, most students wanted absolutely no verbal mistakes in their recording, and for some it took a dozen tries to get it right. Make sure you let kids know that a few “ums” and “ahs” in the narration is not a big deal.

Still, the Prezicast is an effective tool
for student learning. I noticed higher
levels of engagement compared to an
essay assignment earlier in the year.
This impression was borne out
in student feedback. One student
wrote: “It was not the old long essay,
but a new way to learn things, and I
had fun while I made it.”
Another added that it was much
more “creative and interesting” com-
pared to typical assignments. A few
students highlighted the fact that
Prezi is so visual that it helped them
understand the material and convey
it to the audience.

Seth Blodgett, my teaching partner, agreed that the students were enthusiastic about the project and achieved greater understanding of the material compared to years past. Finally, students seemed to have a sense of ownership with their Prezis that they rarely felt with essays: “A Prezicast can show more understanding of the topic because you are explaining it with your own voice and words,” a student said.

Prezi was especially effective at helping students organize the material, both in the prewriting stage and the creation stage. Typically, students can have difficulty organizing their wide-ranging notes into a streamlined essay, but using Prezi at the early stages to collect the notes, assemble them as evidence, and even manipulate their location on the Prezi made this task easier. One student wrote that the Prezi allowed him “to see the visual relationship between different objects and topics,” and that it helped him organize his “paragraphs” better.

Students often struggle to wrangle large amounts of notes into a tightly structured essay, but the screencast made it a smoother transition between notes, ideas, and expression.

Prezicasting now has a place in my toolbox to help students develop their perspectives on an issue; craft a persuasive, supported argument; and convey it to others. In this case, thinking about the essay in a new way increased student engagement in the process and helped with their organizational abilities. I will not abandon the essay, but I see the Prezicast as a complementary tool that approaches the same goal from a different angle: advancing students’ abilities to get their points across.

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank his middle school colleagues, Seth Blodgett, Mark Burpee, and Pete Dohrenwend, for their help with this article.

— Justin P. Jacobson teaches eighth grade social studies in Tokyo at the American School in Japan. Read his class blog at blogs.asij.ac.jp/ss8jacobson.