Break your presentations out of the box

How many times have you sat through a page-turner presentation that almost put you to sleep?

How many times have you been guilty of delivering something along these lines yourself?

As much as we may want to liven things up when we're conducting face to face training or sharing information with colleagues, ditching the presentation slides is not really an option - there is value to having something displayed on a screen to guide participants along. The unfortunate thing is, most of the software we use to create presentations follow this same page-turning slide format that can become monotonous after a while, despite our best efforts. 

I recently came across a tool that takes a totally different approach to presentations that impressed me quite a bit. Prezi frees us from the 'slides' metaphor for displaying content. Instead imagine adding all of your content to a large canvas, where your presentation view allows you to move around the canvas, zoom in and out and rotate the perspective. You can easily show the big picture, zoom in on details and make connections between different elements in an eye-catching way. It's really something best grasped by checking out some of the presentations people have shared on the Prezi website. The bonus is it's free to use under the public license, and pretty reasonable for the other license options, too.

Take a look and see what you think - maybe Prezi can help you liven up your next presentation!