Prezi.com – free account for educators & students

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I’ve extolled the virtues of Prezi before, and have shared my first example presentation (see related links below for URLs).

Now, however, the bods over at Prezi have been listening to the comments that have been posted to twitter and they’ve ‘released’ an account for educators and students.

What’s the fuss, I hear you cry? The fuss is that you can now do more, and it’s still free.

Last week there were three account types;

  • Public: free, 100mb space and all your work has the Prezi watermark (not so bad).
  • Enjoy: $59 per year, 500mb space, set work to private, and no watermark.
  • Pro: $159 per year, 200mb space, work offline, and the same as the Enjoy above.

But now there is the ‘Edu’ packages of the above;

  • Public: same as public above.
  • Edu Enjoy: same as Enjoy above, but free!
  • Edu Pro: same as Pro above but only $59 per year.

The Edu packages don’t have the Prezi watermark on the final presentations, but they do have a brief ‘educational’ use text shown while the presentation loads.

Upgrade
If, like me, you already had a Prezi account, you’ll find you can’t just simply sign up for the new Edu accounts. You’ll have to login to Prezi, then ‘upgrade’ your account. Enjoy.

Video
You can now embed YouTube videos in a presentation, whereas before you would have to download them and load the media file into Prezi. This is not limited to the Edu accounts.

Manual
I’ve been playing and using Prezi for a couple of months and am fairly confident I know what I’m doing (most of the time) but they have also produced this manual – Prezi Online Manual.

Interface
Another really important upgrade feature, other than the new graphical interface (not sure yet, I grew to like the old one, which is still available for the moment):

The helpful folks at Prezi have put this presentation together for you, to show you around the new interface/navigation.

Using Prezi
If you’re still not convinced about Prezi, how to use it, or whether it looks ‘professional’ or not, it was used recently at the TEDGlobal conference in July 2009 by James Geary (below)