One of my favorite and most versatile apps of G Suite is Google Slides. The amount of different activities you can have students do with them is amazing! Last year, I had my students create a GIF with Google Slides and it was said to be the best project of the year. With that, I bring you five things you can do with Google Slides that you didn’t know you could do!
I did write a blog post on Google Slides and Docs quite some time ago, but I want to really give the app the attention it deserves.
Pictures
Pictures enhance your lessons dramatically! Student’s become engaged just from seeing images. It also helps English Language Learners with Tier 1 and 2 vocabulary. Also some images you may want to include in your slide deck – math manipulatives! Screenshot them from a virtual manipulative website or grab them from Google and make as many as the student might need to make the slide deck interactive!
Audio
If you have a lot of text on a slide and want to be able to read it to your students, you can insert audio. I record the audio using Screencastify. After I record and I am brought to the page of the recording, I click “Export as audio only” and then it is saved in that same folder as an audio file. Click “insert”, “Audio” to find the file and voilà! I usually put a call to action for my students like, “Click Here to Listen!” with the audio button right next to it.
Insert Videos
You can insert videos easily, which will enhance your lessons and make them easily understandable for those visual learners. To insert a video click “Insert”, “Video” and you can insert from your Google Drive, search YouTube or by URL.
Animate Feature
The animate feature is great if you want to screen record your voice going over the material. Watch this video of how to model math problems using the animate feature of Google Slides.
Secret Word
Distance learning is new for most of us, how do you know students are actually watching the videos that you’re spending hours creating? To that I say – use a secret word!
In the middle of my model, I randomly say a word (usually it’s my dogs name or a food I love) and tell the students to type the secret word as a private comment on the assignment. I know if students have listened to my audio or watched my video if they follow those instructions.
If you learned something new from this blog post and want to learn more – head to my course page and snag my mini-course bundle for all things Google Slides!
As always, thank you for stopping by!
Enjoy!
alexandra
