In this video I'm going to show you everything you need to know for how to
make Google Slides projects with your students. Making Google Slides projects
with students is a great way to integrate technology, to promote
collaboration, creativity, as well as teach students important and relevant
21st century skills. Google Slides projects allow students to present their
work in ways the traditional pencil and paper projects simply cannot. With Google
Slides, students can select from a huge array of different templates, they can
add images, videos, GIFs, drawings, pretty much any kind of multimedia that's out
there and then you can teach students how to animate their slides to look
extra professional. And students can easily share their Google slides with
each other to collaborate on a project inside or outside of class. My name is
Sam Kary and on my YouTube channel I share
practical ideas, tips, and strategies for how to integrate education technology in
your classroom. In this video I'm going to show you how you can create a
template in Google Slides that you can then push out to students using Google
Classroom. Then I'll show you all the most important educational features of
Google Slides so that you're prepared to teach students how to make templates on
their own. If you find my video helpful, please share it with your teacher
friends, hit the like button to show your support, and subscribe to my channel and
hit the notification bell to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly video
updates. You can also visit my website at www.newedtechclassroom.com to find additional resources
for using technology in your class. First let's look at some actual examples of
Google Slides projects that students have created in my sixth-grade Humanities
classroom. In this first example I'm going to show you a project that I do
with my students after they finish a book that we've just read in class. For
this Google Slide I pre-created a template that I share with students
through Google Classroom and students enter the information that they have
learned. The focus of this first Google Slide project that I do with students is
to become familiar with the format of Google Slides, input high quality content,
do a little bit of customization with adding images and different
backgrounds, and then I also teach students how to do different transitions
so that they can make their slides look a little bit more professional. All right
now let's look at how to actually create one of these templates that you can push
out to students through Google Classroom or another digital fostering platform
that you use. Here I'll show you how I set up the template for having students
do a quote analysis project about a book that they just read. When I'm making
templates, I mostly use text boxes. The text box is indicating to them what
information they need to include on a particular slide. I'll direct students to
erase what I've written and then add their own information. The way you add a
text box is by going up to the 'Insert' button, click 'Insert Text Box,' then you
can drag the text box to resize it and rearrange it however you would like on
the page. To add thickness to the text box, so that it's actually visible, I'll
go up to the line weight, select a border weight, and now you can see that the text
box is actually there for students to see. So now you can see that I'm adding
several different text boxes to my document, as well as some short text
descriptions about what students should be inputting into those text boxes. After
I have some basic text boxes entered I'm going to drag the corners around and use
the alignment tools to make sure that they're sized properly and aligned so
that it looks really neat and professional. In order to duplicate this
slide over and over, all you need to do is double click on the slide you want to
duplicate, click 'Duplicate Slide' so here I'll have a slide that represents each
chapter of the book that we read. After you've created this basic template for
students you can either give it to them as is and let them customize it as they
would like or if you want to model a little bit more for them how they might
customize their slides, you can do things like add some different background
colors or add a background image. So here I'm just going to show you how I would
add a background image to this template in order to motivate my students to do
that when they're creating their own slides. I'll go up to 'Background', choose
'Image,' search for an image that I want or find
an image from my computer. I'll click 'Upload' and now you can see that the
image that I chose is in the background of my slide. Pre-creating a template for
students is a great way to provide them with some scaffolding and also ensure
that students follow a particular structure for their Google Slides
presentations. All right, I'm happy for now with that so
now I'm going to show you how I would push this template out to students on
Google Classroom. First go to the 'Classwork' tab and from there I will
click 'Create an Assignment.' I'll give the project a title and a description and
now I'm going to add that file directly from my Google Drive. I'll find it right
in my recents, I'll click 'Add,' and I'm going to change this function from
'Students can view file' to 'Make a copy for each student.' Now when I click 'Assign,'
all my students will receive an email that they were assigned a template and
when they log into Google Classroom they will see that they have an individual
slide presentation that they can edit and create for themselves. Another option
is that you give students criteria for a project and then teach them more general
skills about how to use Google Slides on their own. Making their own Slides
presentations without a template is definitely a more advanced strategy and
I would recommend that when you are teaching students, you make your own
video tutorial using Screencastify in order to teach students all the
different features of Google Slides, rather than trying to teach them that
live in front of the whole class. When I'm teaching students how to use Google
Slides, one of the first things I'll show them are third party websites where they
can get additional Google Slides templates that are pre-made for them but
that aren't going to tell them the content that needs to go into each of
their boxes. A great third party website is Slides Mania. As you can see on Slides
Mania, there are tons of different Google Slides templates that students can
choose from if they want options that are different from the default themes
that are available on Google Slides. So the beauty of Google Slides is that it
is essentially a massive open-ended multimedia document that can be
collaborated on by anyone anywhere. Google Slides are endlessly customizable
and I like to emphasize with my students that you're not gonna break the internet,
you're not gonna break Google Slides, so go ahead and play around with all the
different features. When I make my own tutorial for students, I will teach them
how to insert different types of media. In particular, I'll direct them to
external websites like Pixabay or Unsplash where they can get images that
they are allowed to use. In the past, I used to send my students to Google
Images a lot to get pictures, but I soon realized that students were using a lot
of images that they didn't technically have the right to use. Teaching students
about making sure that they get images that they're allowed to use is a great
way to fold in some digital citizenship into your Google Slides lesson. Once you
find an image that you like from a website like Unsplash, you can download
it onto your computer and then you can insert that same image back into your
Google Slide. I also make sure to show my students how they can attribute the
source of that image directly on to their Google Slides. Students should also
understand the basics of how to change the font type, how to change the font
size, as well as how to use the different alignment tools. Teaching students how to
add text boxes is also important so that they're able to add text whenever and
wherever they need to on their slide. I'll also show my students how to use
Word Art. As you can see, with Word Art, text is even more customizable than it
is with normal font features and students can do things with text that
make their presentation even more creative and interesting. As with all the
creative projects that I do with my students, we talked about the importance
of strategically choosing color or background and text. Here you can teach
students how they can change the background to be different colors or
gradients of colors. There are other features of Google Slides like inserting
videos, audio files. There are also lots of different shapes and symbols that
students can use to customize their Google Slides however they would like.
Next I'll show students how to add transitions between their slides as
well as how to animate single slides. Adding transitions and animations is
what makes Google Slides look really professional. In order to add a
transition between slides you'll go up to the 'Transition' button. From there,
you'll see a drop-down menu of different transitions that you can choose from,
select a transition, and then you can preview what it will look like as one
slide is transitioning to the next. You'll see that under the transitions
there's also a place where you can add animations. Animations can be added to
specific segments of the Google Slide. So let's say for example that you want to
add an animation to the title. You're going to click on the title, select an
animation that you want to try, click 'Preview' to check out what that animation
is going to look like. You can continue to animate the different parts of the
slide to ensure that the different segments come in when you want them to.
This can be really effective if you're going through a list, bullet points, or
you just want to highlight specific parts of your presentation for viewers
to look at first, rather than presenting the entire slide all at once. If you are
going to be animating text and want it to fly in line by line, it's important to
click that by paragraph box. Now you'll notice that you can also rearrange the
order of the animations however you like. This is useful if you set up animations
in an order that doesn't make sense and you need to rearrange them so that when
you click next the correct segment of the Google Slide is coming in when you
want it to. After I've shown my students all these features I'll make sure that
they understand how to share their document with others by going up to the
'Share' button and then entering the email of other people that they want to share
their presentation with. This will allow them to collaborate with other students
in the class and they can even be working on that project together
remotely in different locations because everything that they do on Google Slides
is saved and stored in the cloud. In today's day and age it's pretty much
guaranteed that students are going to be asked to do some form of digital
presentation at some point in their academic or
professional lives. Teaching students how to use Google Slides in your classroom
is a great way to teach them a relevant skill that's going to help them later in
life, plus they're fully customizable, and students can really get creative with
the work that they produce. If you have any questions about how I've used Google
Slides with my students, please ask in the comments below. Thank you so much for
watching my video to the end. If it was helpful and you learned something, I'd
appreciate it if you hit the like button and share it with other teachers that
you know. You can also click on these two videos to check out some of my other
education technology tutorials and subscribe to my channel and hit the
notification bell to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly video
updates. Thanks so much and have a great week!