Now That's a Knife

In listening to the Google Teacher Tribe Podcast and reading Kasey Bell’s blog post on the Swiss Army Knife for the classroom that is Google Slides, I was inspired to post some ways that we’ve been using it in class in relation sto passion projects as we close out the year. Before your read this article further, I highly recommend you read Kasey’s post. I tried not to regurgitate too much of her post, but that would be impossible. These examples cover parts of the process of the passion product leading up to our presentation night and documentation in student portfolios made in Google Sites.

Pear Deck and Presentations

One of the more traditional uses of Google Slides is teacher led presentations. I am no different, I use presentations as a part of my large group instruction in all of my physics classes. But, Pear Deck has allowed me to add more student interaction into those presentations. With the Google Slides add-on for Pear Deck, I don’t have to use an external tool to build my presentations. The types of interactive slides include text or numerical response, multiple choice, drawing slides, Draggable (slide in which icons can be moved around), and website embedding. I am a proud proponent of Pear Deck based on the positive feedback I get from my students and the Slides add-on makes it easier to integrate.

I’ve written about the Slides add-on here if you are looking for more info.  I used the add-on as a part of introducing the passion project to start the brainstorming project. I was able to solicit and share ideas from ALL students, not just the ones that raised their hands.  It was nice to be able to reinforce that for this passion project all of these topics would work if the students truly were curious or interested in the topic. When displaying these responses, the class can’t see the names associated with the responses. But as a teacher, I can.

Weekly Planner (Linking, Publishing, & Embedding)

As students are moving towards more digital and mobile workflows, the weekly planner on the whiteboard just wasn’t cutting it in my class. Ao, I’ve switched over to a digital schedule using Google Slides.  There is an ebb and flow, but usually a slide is one week. I have the overview for the week on one side and the other side is specific to what is going on that day. If there is an associated document or digital submission, I link it directly to the text. The really nice thing is that students can navigate through the slides to go back a week or more if needed and the links are still live.

We use Canvas for our LMS, so many of these links will take students directly to the digital submission page for the assignment. I’ve been able to embed this Slideshow directly to the front page of our Canvas course so it’s the first thing students see when they enter the course. It was very simple by publishing it to the web and then copying and pasting the embed code into the Canvas page builder. (It would be even easier with a course run on Google Sites).

Since it’s a live version of the Slides, I simply update it from Slides and the changes are reflected in the LMS.  It works like a charm.

There are a few steps I’ve taken to make it a little prettier (possibly more distracting). Changing the Background was one of the first things that I did. It’s very simple by going to the options bar above the slide. But I don’t like to stick with color backgrounds, I like images.  Many times I will use the search function to find a texture by searching for “[color of choice] texture”. As the year has progressed, my pleasure for GIFs has grown. Slides allows the background to be a GIF image! So when going to the search in backgrounds you can enter “[thing you’re looking for] gif”. Usually though, I’ll end up going to giphy.com, finding a great GIF, copying the URL to my clipboard, and pasting it into the image URL for the background.

One of my other favorites for making things pretty is Word Art. I am crazy for it. The ability to change the coloring, font, and formatting (I learned all about reflections and drop shadows from the Google Teacher Tribe) are the types of details.

Student Products

Some of my students create physical products to showcase or demonstrate a skills them learned for their passion project.  But for some, it is not something that may require a more traditional method of presentation. I’ve been working to wean students of of physical posters. My first year of doing the passion project (last year), I realized that I ended up with lots of posters that no student really wanted. I have limited space and wasn’t going to keep them all.  So, they ended up in the dumpster. There is something a little depressing about putting all that student learning and work into the trash. It’s hard not to think of it as a metaphor.

So, I’ve asked students to move to digital presentations rather then posters. Slides tends to be the number one choice. although I am trying to push some students to explore VR presentation options as well (such as Thinglink and Cospaces). The fact that this sharing is created digitally allows the product to be shared beyond that single presentation night.  It allows them to create a product that can be shared outside of a single physical location, single audience, or set time.

Here is an example of a student presentation.  Please note that it includes some internal linking.  So if you click on a picture, you’ll get more info on it.

These digital products can easily be added to their digital portfolios as evidence without losing any detail like you would in taking pictures of a physical poster. I love how easily and seamlessly the new Google Sites integrates with G Suite files, no embed code needed!  

Table Signs (Resizing and Templates)

Although I’m asking students to move away from physical signs for our expo night, I did want them to have a simple sign at their table so that attendees could read if the presenter was engaged with another attendee. It was meant to introduce their topic and potentially hook them to want to learn more. The great thing about Slides is the ability to resize a slide. We resized out slides to 11” x 17” and used it as the canvas for the table signs.  Students were them able to print them off in color at that size. Super easy!

This year, I’ve moved away from using Google Docs as templates in favor of slides. I’ve discussed it in a previous post.  Setting up a template for the poster allowed me to make sure all students had the correct sizing for the slide and allowed me to include directions in the presenter notes section.  The ability to include the instructions here has been a tremendous boost this year!

Again, because these are created in slides, they can easily be added to the student Google Sites portfolio.  

Creating Images

Finally, Google Slides have served this blog immensely.  All of the annotated images you’ve seen above were created in Google Slides by uploading screenshots and annotating with shapes. Then, downloading a slide from the file menu as a jpeg. In addition, all of my blog post introduction images are created in slides.  For the backdrop of my posts, I find high quality images using the Unsplash add-on for Google Slides. You can find images with a simple search toolbar. Of course, I add Word Art on top of that to try to make the text pop!

These are only a few of the many ways Kasey has for using Google Slides beyond Powerpoints. I hope to try more out in preparation for next school year.