Computers, don't you just love em when they work?

I'm an artist called Beth, and for the U Choose project I'm working with young people from Colne Primet High and Pendle Vale College exploring prezi to create life road maps, featuring hopes and dreams, steps to get there and bags of personal resources to help along the way.

A prezi is not some kind of cute furry animal or a thing you get at Christmas, but its a different way of presenting and storing ideas and information. It gives the maker (should we call them a Prezer? Maybe not) an unending blank page onto which they can add text, internet links, images, animations and link it all together with arrows and frames to make it more readable. All this is done online and stored online so that you can access it anywhere the internet is, home, library, internet cafe, school, on the train etc etc etc.

So this week I sat down with two groups from Primet and Pendle Vale, showed them my example and set them tasks to start creating their own prezi account and first prezi.
In early talks about the project we felt it important that, as the pupils would be adding personal things about their hopes and dreams they should have it private at the start and then decide if they were happy for everyone to see it.

The main question was "What is success to you?" Examples from my Road map, which I tried to create as sincerely as possible included "To be a good Friend" and to "Support myself financially through my art in the next three years." (You can see this here). The pupils at the different schools shared several aspirations but some were very ambitious, noting world domination and making a droid army in the basement amoungst their ambitions.

When we discussed what might be realistic I pitched the idea that no matter how much I might want to fly I still couldn't climb a cliff jump off and expect just my hopes to propel me into the clouds. They were a resourceful bunch and said "You Could take flying lessons and learn to fly a plane", "You could invent a machine to help you fly." "You could learn how to hang glide." I had to concede that they were indeed correct and I could kind of fly if I really wanted to and the chat brought in notions we will discuss next session, the how bit.

Personally I think I'll be leaving world domination till another day, too much hard work and responsibility for me but the gliding sounds like fun. I'll blog again here soon, maybe with a few of the pupils little pictures they drew to go on their prezis. We could have a game of Pictionary where you try and guess their aspirations from the pics.