Lesson Spotlight: Explore Google Slides
Do you want your students to have a greater depth on the tools available in Google Slides? Google Slides is an amazing tool that can help you educate an audience with meaningful and visually appealing content. By having a stronger foundation about tools available in Google Slides, you are in a position to make more powerful presentations. This unit requires students to complete 15 tasks. Each task has easy to follow directions and a short video on each slide to demonstrate how to complete each task. Students and teachers will learn wonderful tools in Google Slides that will help them make more visually appealing presentations and navigate a powerful tool to enhance learning. My students enjoyed completing this unit because it gave them a greater understanding of the power of Google slides. This is a great activity you can assign with a substitute since it has easy to follow directions with short videos that make it very clear how to complete various tasks.
Video examples on the project: Color Shapes; Swap Images; Link Image to Sound; and Using Word Art to Create Your Name
Google slides is by far one of my favorite Google apps. I have used it for students to showcase digital products, share templates that allow them to customize for their interests, create literacy units, record mistakes using Screencastify | create animations | design book covers | create clipart, thematic presentations | history lessons | geography lessons product decorations | character education | digital citizenship, etc. I highly recommend you check out my free resource to become savvier with Google slides and how to navigate Google.
I have also used Google slides to encourage collaboration among my students. I will share a Google slide with an entire class and assign each student a slide to edit. Once they edit their slide, they provide constructive and positive feedback to at least 2 of their classmates. My free resource demonstrates how to go about sharing a Google slide with an entire class because we all know how one student can make a mistake accidently or intentionally, which can impact this experience. I haven’t had many issues because I talk about the logistics of the unit and reinforce how important it is to do the right thing. Overall, the collaborative experience is powerful and beneficial to students. I have seen a lot of fabulous feedback from students to support their peers. I let them know that they are giving feedback to support their classmates so they can be better.
In addition to my amazing Google slide units listed above, Matt Miller of Ditch that Textbook, put out a fabulous resource on Google Slides. He provides 30 interactive Google Slides activities for classroom excitement on his blog. This resource is definitely worthy of investigating.
After completing my lessons with your students, I would love your feedback on any of my units. Fill out the survey and I will randomly draw names for another free digital lesson at the end of each month. I encourage any educator who uses my resources to reach out to me if they have issues. I plan on dedicating my time to helping teachers to make their lives easier. I know how hard it is to be a teacher. We have so many hats to fill and teaching is only part of a teacher's job. I think back on my first years of teaching and am amazed how much technology has changed. I have spent a great deal of my free time to become more proficient with tech integration in the classroom. I have continued to modify my lessons to maximize the learning experience of my students. I find it challenging and very exciting. You can see student comments by visiting this link.
