The 2021-2022 school year is about to start. As I started to think about what I could have students do to introduce themselves and came across an idea posted by Ms. McCurdy on a Facebook group I belong to. She posed the question:
That immediately brought to mind the plant and animal cell diagrams I drew a while back. After a bit of trial and error to make things fit and teasing out what each organelle could represent I came up with this activity where students can add text and use the paint bucket to color in the organelles.
Over the last month, and with the uncertainty of how we will re-open, I decided to make a move to digital notebooks using Google slides. Taking inspiration from Matt Miller's Google Slides Interactive Notebooks, as well as the thousands of teachers that came before me and graciously published templates (SlidesMania comes to mind) and YouTube videos, I came up with about 20 that I plan to use. As you know, I am all about sharing so I am publishing them all here for you to peruse and make copies if you wish.
This post falls under the "How did I not know this before" category...
Over the last few days, I have been updating my 8th-grade waves unit and will be using this performance task I found online. As I was working, I was going back and forth between the document and a slide deck "template" that I want students to use as a guide to organizing their work. My students tend to lose track of things so this was my way of ensuring that once they got to the end of the task they had everything they needed. Anyway, long story short I placed the document, which is rather long, into my preferred delivery site (WIX) and embedded the slide deck but was not particularly satisfied with the way it looked. I needed side by side and rather specific placements.
I definitely did not want to just give access to the slide deck since I know that my students would just make a copy of the template and use that instead of going through the instructions. I also did not want to add all the instructions to the slide deck. So then I decided that I wanted to add the slide deck to the instructions document.
I know that I could take a screenshot of the slides I wanted to reference and then link them, but while searching I came across the absolute easiest way of doing this:
How to Embed a Google Slide Into a Google Doc
1. Open your Google slide deck. 2. From the left side panel, click and select the slide you want to add to your Google doc. Go up to Menu and select Edit > Copy.
3. Open the Google Doc where you want your slide to be. Place your cursor in the location in the document where you want to add the slide.
4. Go up to the menu and select Edit > Paste.
5. Choose "Link to presentation" to make it an active link.
Google docs will treat this as any other image, so you can resize, add borders, crop to shape or whatever you want. The absolute beauty of this is that the link not only directs the user (my students) to the specific slide, but also any changes made to the slide in the slide deck are updated in the doc by just clicking on update. You can see how this worked in the document I was talking about before:
I am thinking that this little trick can be used for hyperdocs, instructables or even lab reports. What do you think. What other uses do you see?
This morning, as I was looking over my upcoming lessons on analyzing webs I found out that the app I used to create drag and drop assignments is no more. Since before we get deeper into what happens in a food web when the population of an organism decreases or increases I need to be sure that my students are able to track the different food chains within a web, and we have been struggling with what is known in my classroom as "the arrows mean something", this was not a step I was willing to simply forgo. So I turned to the trusty internet for something already made. As I was inputting different search parameters I stumbled upon Matt Miller's "Creating moveable digital activities with Google Drawings + Slides". I watched the first part and, being a Google Drawing fan I went ahead and created my drawing, stacking multiples of the same text boxes as needed by simply copy/pasting them on top of each other and placing them as a stack on top of an "empty" box.
I felt rather pleased with myself and called my daughter to try it out. Dutifully she did, and immediately two super important things became evident:
1. I needed to be able to lock the background
After another round of searching and watching Matt's whole video, I found out that while you cannot lock the background on Google Drawing, you can set an image as a background on Google Slides.
2. I also needed to be able to "lock" the text the students were dragging so they could not modify it accidentally.
Instead of adding them as text boxes, I created the text and used the snipping tool to create them as images. While they can still be deleted as a "block" the content cannot be modified.
I am sharing the student template to give you an idea of what you can do.
I then started thinking, what else could we do with this? I love the idea of the drag and drop but also wanted this to be a little more challenging. Inspiration struck as I moved on to a different grade level, where I decided that students could use the traditional labeling assignment as a drag and drop that leads to a presentation. Using the same technique as before, but adding links to blank slides students could do more than just a simple labeling assignment.
For example, in this assignment where students will be asked to label a plant and an animal cell and use that as a springboard to create a presentation detailing organelle functions.
What do you think? What other uses of the drag and drop do you see yourself creating?
It is project presentation day! Your students are excited (and anxious) about presenting their work. They had lots of choices to demonstrate what they learned, each team has a different topic or solution to the problem. They have also used different tools to create amazing presentations. Slide decks using Powerpoint, Google presentations, Prezi, E-maze or even Piktochart abound. Everything is going swell, until students start presenting.
That is when you again realize that it does not matter that everyone is presenting something different or that the tool chosen has lots of bells and whistles. Students, and many adults, still rely on text heavy slide decks, and more often than not, they "present" by reading each slide out-loud. By the third presentation, and even though you have stated several times, "I can read your slide, turn around and tell us about your work", you are ready to pull your hair out. Out of the corner of your eye you see Juanita doodling and Johnny dozing off. The class is bored out of their minds. Something has to change!
Now you may already be thinking about authentic audiences, but the same thing happens when students are presenting to the community at large, and even in professional settings. And yes, I know that presentation skills need to be taught and students need to practice beforehand. We have had complete lessons on what makes a good presentation and critiqued posted presentations from around the web. But even then, the reliance on reading text-heavy slide decks is still an issue.
As I searched for an answer, I came across the idea of using an Ignite presentation format. The Ignite presentation is a 5 minutes long presentation with 20 slides where the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. You can think of it as the presentation equivalent of a sonnet.
The idea is simple, but putting it into practice will require some prep and teaching on my part. This is the plan:
1. Introduce the idea of Ignite presentations. Share Scott Berkun's - "Why and How to Give an Ignite Talk".
3. Based on the planner, students can create a slide index (on paper or a Google doc). This is basically a "what will go in each of the presentation slides". Students then practice with this slide index in hand to figure out what to say and what to include as visuals for that slide.
4. Have students choose a slide deck creator, and draft their visual presentation. Remind them of the "20/15" rule.
Google slides: Create the 20 slide deck. Publish to the web, and select auto-advance every 15 seconds. The link created is what they submit to be played on presentation day.
Prezi: Prezi does not offer the 15 second option in auto-play, so students will need to get a little more creative. For example it could be 15 slides every 20 seconds or 30 slides every 10 seconds.
Emaze: Apply the 15 second stop duration in slides options to the complete 20 slides presentation.
The key idea in this step is that no matter what tool they use, they will be presenting using the automatic changing of slides. It should almost be a choreographed dance between the slide deck and the presenters. Practice is key!
