Why Google Slides is one of the Best Google Apps for Education

Why Google Slides is one of the Best Google Apps for Education:

As a teacher who embraces technology integration in the classroom, I must admit I was extremely excited when I found out that my department was going to get to pilot a new Google Classroom program within our school.  This pilot program was offered to us four years ago and I can't say enough how much it has not only improved our content deliver but has enhanced our lessons.  Google Apps for Education has given our students more opportunities to learn and develop the skills they need as 21st century learners.  When we first piloted the program we were a BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) school which was equally exciting but also a tad bit frustrating.  We didn't know what devices our students were going to have, if they had any devices at all.  The first year of technology integration we were learning as much, if not more, about it than the students were, but it was a start.

The Google Toolbox: 

 There were so many new tools at our discretion it was at times overwhelming.  The questions that came up were...where do we start?  What should we use?  What do the kids know and what are we going to have to teach them?  It seemed as if we had more questions than answers.  However as the year progressed it didn't take us long to see the immense power, we and our students, had at our fingertips.  We started working with new programs, apps, games, add-ons, editing software.  If technology was a swimming pool we didn't dip our toes in the water we dove straight in, and although at times it felt like we were simply treading water to stay a float, we all became much better swimmers by the end of the year.  As we started to explore the different apps for education we quickly started to figure out the nuances of each one.  Google Docs was a simplified word processing program which had some great additions for instant research and add-on capabilities that made grammar checks and citing much easier.  Google Sheets was a great way to track data and chart it in easy to read charts. Google Forms was great for simple class surveys or even quizzes when set up properly, and now that they have a locking mechanism it will be even more useful for assessments.  There were several different apps that we manipulated and explored inside and out, however there was one in particular that we saw incredible potential, user friendly and very adaptable, Google Slides.  

What is Google Slides:

At first glance it is easy to see that Google Slides is a direct competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint.  It is a way to present information to an audience on whatever subject matter you wish.  The user can create a pack of slides with specific themes, headings, bullet point statements, images, videos.  Everything that PowerPoint does, right down to the animations and transitions, Google Slides does. However the true power that comes from Google Slides are some of the things it offers which might be a little outside the typical presentation format. 

The Power of Google:

What Google Slides has that Power Point does not is the "Power of Google".  I know it sounds cliche or perhaps even cheesy but it is also accurate.  Google Slides gives you all the strengths of one of the worlds more powerful search engines built into the Presentation.  You can link or even embed outside sites into your slides including YouTube videos. Google Slides allows you to insert hyperlinks within your slides to other links, to other slides, or to both.  It's like taking all the advantages of a HyperDoc and inserting it into a Google Slide (see my post on HyperDocs to learn more about the advantages of HyperDocs).  What we found with Google Slides is that it combined the best of each of the Google Apps for Education all in one.  We found the formatting of Google Slides much easier to manipulate than that of a Google Docs.  We could insert text boxes and move them around the page, we could insert hyperlinks to Google Forms, or link them to a google sheet to create a graph, we could insert images or videos and move them around the page with ease.  Google Slides became our leading way of delivering digital content to our students.  As we continued to utilize Google Slides within the class we started to learn many of the ins and outs and started to develop fairly sophisticated activities using Google Slides.

Native American Experience: An Example of Google Slides Lesson

Attached here is a copy of an activity that we used in class to help deliver digital content to our students on the  The native American Experience during the time of Westward Expansion in the United States.  We wanted a way to deliver content which was engaging and guided them through key points of our content but allowed them to work independently and at the own pace.  This freed us as teachers up so we could work in small groups with students making sure that each student's needs were being attended to as they were working through the material.  Google Slides was the perfect tool to help us deliver the content, but there were some things we wanted to include that was not as straightforward as what Google Slides appeared to be.  First off we wanted a way to include a voice over for the slides so that students who were ELL (English Language Learners) or students who prefer read allows had the opportunity to listen as they were reading along to the text.  Google Slides did not have a built in feature for a voice over, so we had to think a little outside the box, and what we did was very effective and very simple.  To include our voice over all we did was to do a simple short screen cast of the three history teachers reading the slide aloud.  Once we created the screen cast using (screen castify or Wevideo) we simply shrunk down the video to a small box in the corner of the slide and insert the video along with a text prompt saying "click here to listen to the slide."  This was a simple solution that fixed our first issue.

    The next thing we wanted to include were quiz questions.  Now of course we could have put in a link to a google form which would have worked but would have also required students to jump back and forth between the two different programs.  Would it have worked yes, but we wanted to try and keep everything within the slides and their note pages they were working off of, so instead we built in quiz questions on slides using hyperlinks to the answer choices.  The links were linked to other slides.  If they selected the right answer it brought them to a slide that told them they were correct and had additional information they needed for their notes on it.  If they were incorrect they would be linked to a different slide saying sorry incorrect answer and provided another link for them to click on to go back to the quiz slide.  Since then Google Slides has made quiz questions even easier by creating an add on feature called pear deck which allows you to insert assessments straight into Google Slides.  The hyperlink above titled "The Native American Experience, is a download link which will download a copy of the Google Slides activity  to give you an idea of how we developed a fun and engaging digital lesson using Google Slides.

Why Slides Work:

Google Slides work because of its flexibility.  It allows users to manipulate the slides to whatever desired effect needed.  Designers can collaborate using the sharing options provided through Google products which allows more than one person to work in unison.  It can be used as a simple presentation tool to give a public lecture or speech, it can be used to create note sheets giving the creator easier formatting options, it can even be used to create engaging 21st century personalized learning opportunities for your students.  That is the power of Google Slides as long as you are a creative thinker it will allow you to do whatever you need it to do.  The features of Google Slides and its adaptiveness is what makes it one of the most powerful tools in the Google Apps for Education tool box.