Google Slides: Not Just Another Presentation Tool

If I had only one EdTech tool to ever use again, I'd pick Google Slides. Hands down. At first glance, it looks like your average presentation tool, but anyone with an innovative mindset (Shoutout to George Couros whose book, Innovators Mindset, is currently on my Kindle) can see that Google Slides can do so much more.

So, how do we innovate with Google Slides?  Well, for one, we stop having every kid stand up and deliver a presentation over similar (or even the same--yikes) content.  There's a time and place for a student presentation, but your run-of-the-mill slideshow presentation doesn't have much of a place in today's classroom.

In fact, I was inspired to start re-thinking presentations after my high school friend (now rock start teacher in Pittsburgh) Katie tweeted the blog post: Don't Make Presentation Day the Worst Day several years ago.  Since then, I've made it my personal mission to discover new uses for Google Slides.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Jigsaw Content:

In terms of instruction, "Jigsaw" refers to an instructional strategy used to allow students to collaborate and build comprehension of a topic.  Usually students are assigned into groups, and each group is responsible for a portion of the topic.  So let's say your students need to learn about a complex topic, and you're trying to figure out a way to make it more student-centered so that you're not just talking to them while they take notes over the topic.  Why not design a Google Slides presentation with the different facets of a topic split up over several different slides?  Have each group become an expert on their portion of the topic and teach each other.  Or better yet, have the students create individual slides in a bigger presentation to be used by the whole class.  

A few weeks ago, I saw a social studies teacher use this strategy to have students learn about different Civil War battles in Missouri.  Different groups researched different battles, but they all collaborated on one big Google Slides deck.  The end result was a comprehensive look at Civil War battles in our state (and a great study guide to boot).

I've used this strategy in professional development as well.  Last Fall, teachers all picked a tech tool that would help facilitate student-centered instruction, researched the tool, developed some ideas for practical application, and shared their findings with their peers.

Choose Your Own Adventure Activity:

Who knew Google Slides could facilitate personalized learning in the classroom?  Our school is currently switching from iPads to Chromebooks as our 1:1 device.  I've been given the great privilege of helping teachers prepare for this transition.  We've done some basic Chromebook training, but we're ready to start thinking deeper about how Chromebooks will mesh with our instruction.  For an upcoming PD session, I developed a Choose Your Own Adventure Google Slides so teachers can pick the direction they'd like to go in terms of how they further their Chromebook understanding during the PD session.  I developed the possible paths from the needs of the teachers in my building.  The starting point for all of these paths looks like this:

Each option has a "click here" button that will take them to the content that they want to learn during the session.  Everyone makes their own choice and can learn in a way that's meaningful to them!

What makes this possible?  Google Slides allows you to insert links into the slide that will take you to a specific slide within the presentation.  As a teacher, you decide the possible paths and design your Google Slides accordingly.  It's super simple.  Once you put words or images on your slide that you know you want to turn into a link, just highlight the text, click "Insert" from the menu at the top, then click "Link."

Next a pop-up menu will appear, and you will select "Slides in this presentation."

Now, there's a decent amount of planning to go into this type of instruction, but I think it's well worth it.  Often teachers hear about personalized learning and say they have no clue how to implement it. Google Slides is an easy (and free) answer!  Give it a shot and see what happens!  And if you need help brainstorming how this might work, don't hesitate to contact me!

Video Resource Book:

When I taught Technology Applications, I had over 600 students on my roster, and I saw each student about once a week.  To complicate matters, it was my job to teach them difficult tasks like how to build a Google Site or a blog.  If you know anyone who's ever built a site or blog for the first time, you know that they won't fully understand after hearing how to do it once.  To allow myself to "be" in five different classrooms at once, I used Screencastify to record screencasts showing how to do all the things they needed to know how to do when setting up their sites and blogs.  Then I inserted each of those videos into a Google Slides presentation and put a table of contents on the first slide.  I then put each video on individual slides that followed.  On the table of contents, I used the same method described above (linking to a specific slide in the presentation) to link students to the videos they needed. 

Here's what the table of contents looked like:

When students were "stuck," they could come here, click on what they needed, and immediately have a video showing them how to do the task that had them stuck.

Teachers could easily use this method with any sort of instructional videos!  It's easy to embed videos into Google Slides, too.  You simply click "Insert" from the menu at the top, then "Video."

Next, a pop-up menu will appear asking you from where you want to insert your video.  You can select Youtube, URL, and Google Drive!  

My personal favorite screencasting extension is Screencastify!  If you haven't checked it out, you should!

Collaborative E-Book:

One way to make learning relevant is to publish student work!  This sounds like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be.  Students can easily create an e-book using Google Slides.  First and foremost, if you want the Google Slides to be the size of a book, you'll have to change the page size. 

Simply click "File" in the menu at the top of your Slides document and select "Page Setup."

Next, a menu will pop up that looks like this:

Click where it says "Widescreen 16:9" to see a drop-down menu of other options and select "Custom."

Change your dimensions to whatever size you want.  In this case, I changed it to the standard size of a piece of paper.

And then your Google Slides deck magically changes to the size you put!

I used this strategy with teachers earlier in the school year, when we created a "Best Practices" e-book to showcase some of the new instructional strategies and instructional technology we had been utilizing.  The cover of our book looked like this:

Each teacher had a blank template on which they could enter their information about their lesson.  Our example template looked like this:

This method could easily be used with students in the classroom to create individual or collaborative e-books over virtually any content!  Also, if you're looking for a way for students to keep digital notebooks for your class, this could easily be the way to go!

Embedded Poll Everywhere Polls:

I recently learned that you can embed Poll Everywhere polls directly into your Google Slides deck, so I immediately went to check it out.  

First, you have to install the Poll Everywhere Chrome Extension. 

Next, you will want to click on the Poll Everywhere extension icon in the upper right-hand corner of your browser and click "Polling in Google Slides."

Clicking this will open up the Poll Everywhere website.  At this point you will need to either log in (if you already have an account) or sign up (if you don't have an account).

Now you can open a new Google Slides, and you'll see a new Poll Everywhere option on the main menu!

When you click "New" and "Poll" it will open a window that lets you create your poll question.  Just type your poll question and click "Insert" to put it on the slides.

When you are in present mode within your Google Slides, your poll will pop up with all the information for participants to answer!

All right.  That's it for now!  I hope you have a change to innovate with Google Slides soon!