Emaze

So what is emaze? Emaze is an online presentation tool that helps to create unique presentations by using pre-designed templates or creating slides from scratch. Emaze allows users to create spectacular visual presentations, simply and fast. Presentations are an essential tool in education. Whether it is creating presentations for students, teachers, or for the district office, presentations make up a critical component in the process of communicating ideas to a target audience, as well as to impress upon them an image of being creative and professional.

What other presentation tools are available? Today, there are two key tools for creating presentations. One is of course Microsoft PowerPoint, the software behind most of the presentations. PowerPoint has been part of the Microsoft Office suite for more than 20 years, and in the course of this time, not much has changed conceptually with their product. It remains the same tool that presents customized slides, one after the other. The second is Prezi, whose popularity has grown quickly over the past few years. Prezi brings a slightly different concept to the notion of presentations.

Is emaze an alternative to PowerPoint? It seems like people are tired of PowerPoint and they are looking for a viable alternative. Emaze makes it easy to build pre-designed slides that use templates to provide a professional impression. Users choose from a selection of templates that dictate how their slides will look and feel. When adding new slides, users can either insert a blank slide or choose from a selection that have been pre-populated with content, to aid with the selection of a layout. For those with no design or slideware experience, it is an easy way to produce slides – and transitions – that look good. So what is so special about emaze? Emaze offers certain advanced features, such as hyperlinking. As emaze is focused on delivering standalone presentations and sharing them online, the links could be used to refer audiences to references or to sites containing further information on a topic. The best feature of emaze is its cloud capabilities. Not only does it provide an automatic platform to host your finished video presentations online, but it enables multiple users to collaborate on the same presentation. You can also easily share your presentation on social media sites from within emaze itself, and the advantage of cloud-based app is that it can be accessed from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection.

How can you get started? To get started, you have to sign up to Emaze Website by providing a valid e-mail address and opening a User account.

Two main user accounts are as follows:

1. “Standard User” (free account): A Standard User may store up 12 presentations at a time, which are public at all times (i.e, can freely be accessed, viewed and used by other Users). A non-removable emaze logo always appears on Standard Users’ Presentations.

All of the content that someone creates as a Standard User, including all of the information within the presentations, are available to anyone who has access to the internet. Public Presentations can be viewed by other Users and are available for others to access and view online and use at their discretion. Anyone can have access to Standard Users’ presentations, and anyone can view, distribute, and publicly display those presentations.

2. “Pro User”, “Business” plan (paid account): A paid user is able to store an unlimited number of presentations, which do not include the emaze logo. These presentations designated as private will be available to Pro Users only.

More Information regarding the different packages, as well as their pricing, and billing method, etc., can be found at http://www.emaze.com/pricing/ 

Once registered, explore the presentations made by others, preview the templates and select the one that best match the main idea of the presentation.  The editor is shown in the picture below. The editor is fairly straight forward. Even if someone don’t have time to do a deep dive and learn all the bells and whistles, it only takes a few minutes to figure out the toolbar up top. The editor layout has:

• A slide and section navigator to the far left

• Tools to add or change Text, Images, Media, Shapes, and Charts in the middle area

• Standard controls, Copy, Paste, Delete, Undo, and Redo, on the right

  • Save and Play options on the top right corner. Emaze, however, is awesome, and automatically saves the  work every few seconds.

What went into making of this emaze presentation? The emaze below is a math fun quiz that I used with some of my students once they were done with Science North Carolina Final Exam (NCFE) for 6th grade. Our math scores just came out and we found that our students are below grade level, specifically in multiplication. The teachers in 6th grade decided to review basic math in a fun way so the students can remain engaged after science and social studies NCFE. All teachers will agree with me that it is a daunting task to teach students after End-of-Grade testings (EOGs).

I gave them a few minutes for each math question and then randomly pick students to go to the smartboard and click on their answer. All other students were eager to see if the answer would be correct or not. Research has proven that if students are laughing and learning, they can retain the information better. Emaze is not only a great tool to present information in a creative way but can also be used to practice for the EOGs and NCFEs in a fun way.

As a future administrator, I can use emaze to create presentations for my staff, students, parents, and district office. Teachers can also use emaze to scaffold students' speaking and presentation skills. They can divide their students into groups, then have each group of students study the presentation taken from the emaze to scaffold students' speaking and presentation skills. 

All content teachers can utilize this site to help students hone outstanding presenting and speaking skills associated with balanced literacy and current technology. We can allow the students to create their own presentations individually or in small groups, and they should be required to use all of the design elements (images, media, audio, graphs/ charts). Emaze has many advantages than drawbacks.  The only drawback it has is that emaze needs newer computers with more computing power.  Emaze is still the best alternative to PowerPoint and the tool's many features make it solid, easy-to-use tool to create engaging presentations, both for teachers and school administrators. 

References

Emaze: NextGen presentation platform | GeekTime. (2013, June 4). Retrieved June 2, 2015, from http://www.geektime.com/2013/06/04/emaze-nextgen-presentation-platform/

Emaze: Review. (n.d.). Retrieved June 2, 2015, from http://www.m62.net/presentation-skills/presentation-technology/emaze-review/

Terms of Use - emaze. (n.d.). Retrieved June 2, 2015, from https://www.emaze.com/terms-of-use/