Sometimes Free Applications are Awesome: Pro Wise

Hats off to the companies who give things away for free, especially to education.  Before I write this I don't know this company, have in no way been asked to write this - it's just an honest review.

Promise Presenter - An alternative?

So, here we go - Prowise Presenter - available here - https://prowise.com/en_gb/presenter/

I've fallen in love with this little piece of presenting software over the last few weeks and I'm not turning back to my trusty Notebook presenter files.

I first came across the software at our local education partnership computing meeting and the company was there demonstrating its very impressive screens with built in PCs, swivel screens etc etc.  All very impressive, but it was the software I was interested in, not the hardware.  This has to be right to sell the hardware. 

Pro Wise Presenter: Ease of use

Firstly and most importantly and one of it's big selling points (hold on it's free!) is that all the files are held in the cloud. What a simple Idea, but one that has proved a master stroke for me.  I can work at home, not bother with dropbox, memory sticks, hoping that the right software is installed on the Mac or PC I'm using when I get to school - it is entirely browser based.

Log in and your work is waiting for you, exactly as you left it when you prepared it at home, on another PC or Mac.  I loved this as it meant there was no time wasted. Of course if the network is down, there is another totally different problem - but how often is it, nowadays, really? Cloud for me everytime!

What about all my other files? What about all my old Notebook presentations?

The first thing I asked at the demonstration was about my old stock of presentations I had.  Can they be used?  

Yep! No problem. Simply import them into the presenter software and away you go. All the links are there, images, video - everything!  

You can import Pdfs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Notebook etc

And now they are all in one place, online.

The Interface: Nice Little Tools

Here is a screen grab of one of the pages from my current workbook.

The usual tools are there, you'd expect from a presenting package and they work very easily and very intuitively. So far, so good.

You can see that I have embedded video files for my art lesson this week. We used a step by step video guide to help us draw castles and wolves - all based around our story 'Dawn Wind' by Rosemary Sutcliffe.

Now, I really like how easy it is to embed videos into the presentation. The whole process is contained within the software.  Simply search for a video and it will perform a 'safe search' of YouTube for you. Click on the video and it is ready to go in your presentation.  Already have the URL, then just paste it in the search box and it automatically embeds it into the presentation for you. 

This process is the same for images as well. Nice and simple, nice and quick and relatively safe - the kids could do it.  

So far, so good really - there is so much more to explore!

There really is so much more to explore, as I haven't even touched on the 'ProConnect' feature available, again, FREE!  Pro Connect allows you to set interactive challenges using their Free app for iOS or Android and then see the results live on the screen. You can even export the data it collects into Excel, to keep - superb for assessment purposes!

This will be a totally different bog, worthy of it's own pages. Stay tuned, when I've more time to play.

In the meantime, go and download it. Try it, why not. It may make your life so much easier.  In fact I guarantee it really will.  I'll let the company themselves have the final word.