{"id":6443,"date":"2011-05-03t09:00:46","date_gmt":"2011-05-03t15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=6443"},"modified":"2011-05-03t11:22:12","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03t17:22:12","slug":"see-what-i-mean-using-prezi-in-mathematics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2011\/05\/see-what-i-mean-using-prezi-in-mathematics\/","title":{"rendered":"see what i mean: using prezi in mathematics"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>this is a guest post by hang wang<\/strong>, a graduate student in mathematics. the post is part of our spring \u201csee what i mean\u201d blog series<\/strong> highlighting the effective use of visuals in presentations and lectures.<\/em><\/p>\n at a math conference in may 2010, i was impressed by a presentation in which the speaker, scott morrison of uc-berkeley, used a fascinating slide. the slide had everything he wanted to present on one large page. during the presentation, the computer screen moved around and focused on different parts of the page. when terminology was explained in a theorem, the page zoomed in to show the definition. as morrison described the \u201cbig picture\u201d of the theory, the page zoomed far out to show the topic in relation to other math concepts.<\/p>\n the tool scott morrison used to create this fancy slide was a mystery to me, until i attended a workshop on visual thinking by derek bruff at the cft\u2019s graduate student teaching event for professional development this january. derek showed us many ways to use visual thinking in our teaching, but it was the zooming presentation tool prezi<\/a>, the tool morrison used in his presentation, that impressed me most. unlike powerpoint, which forces a linear structure, prezi is useful for displaying multi-dimensional structures of complicated diagrams.\u00a0 it is also rather easy to learn. just go to the prezi website and watch the tutorial. then you will be ready to prepare your favorite presentation!<\/p>\n the first time i tried to apply my new toy was a lecture in the undergraduate seminar in mathematics titled \u201cchaos and fractals<\/a>.\u201d before i attended derek\u2019s workshop, i had already designed slides for the talk using powerpoint.\u00a0 but after i got to know prezi, i felt that using prezi\u2019s zooming feature would be a vivid way to show the self-similarity property of fractals. for example, i first showed photos of a lightning bolt and romanesco broccoli, then zoomed into the pictures to show the similarities between micro and macro structures of these objects. the zooming made possibly by prezi demonstrated visually the fractal qualities of the real world.<\/p>\n