If you want to make interesting and engaging slides for your online course, you’ve got
to get expensive software and have years of design experience, right?
Nope.
You can actually make really nice looking and engaging slides with free software and
zero design experience.
In this video, I’m going to show you how to use one of the many free tools out there
to make beautiful, engaging slides for your online course.
Let’s get into it!
Hello creators, I’m Ben Toalson from Podia, where we empower creators like you to make
a living doing what you love.
This video is part three of a series of videos aimed at helping you make a presentation based
online course.
If you haven’t already done so, check out the previous videos in this series so you’ll
have a solid foundation.
For our slide presentation, we’re going to use Google’s free Slides feature.
All you need is a free google account and you automatically have access to this tool.
Once you’ve got access to google slides, follow along as I walk you through some easy
steps for creating amazing online course slides.
Step one, make sure you’ve got your outline and script handy.
Hopefully at this point you’ve not only created an outline, but you’ve got some
solid copy in there that you can use for your presentation.
Keep both your outline and script available so you can copy over any text you plan to
use as you build your slides.
Your outline is also going to help determine how you’ll organize your information as
you create your slides.
I recommend creating separate presentations for each lesson.
Step two, choose a slide template.
Google slides has a handful of beautifully designed templates that include several different
styles and formats.
Find one that fits closely with your brand and click on it.
You’ll see the left column of your screen populate with various arrangements and designs
within that main theme.
Make sure the available layouts will work with how you plan to present your information.
For example, if you use graphs, you may want a layout that has some kind of pre-made graph
design, if you plan to use a lot of images, you may want a several different image-based
layout options.
If it doesn’t seem like that template has the layouts you’re looking for, feel free
try others until you find one that works, but keep in mind that you can always add or
build your own elements.
Step three, title your slide document.
As I mentioned before, I recommend creating separate presentations for each lesson.
For your first lesson, go ahead and click on the document title near the upper left
of your screen and type in the module name and lesson name like this.
You’ll also want to do this for the first slide in your presentation along with your
course title.
You can use this as is and simply add your course, module, and lesson title, or you can
use the text tool and create additional text areas of different sizes and weights.
You’ll repeat this step for each subsequent lesson, but first…
Step four, build your first presentation.
Using your outline as a guide, determine which kinds of layouts will work best for your presentation.
Move these slides to the top and put them in order by clicking and dragging.
If there are other slide layouts you don’t plan to use, just leave them at the bottom
for now.
We’re going to go through a few elements you may use and how to build them into your
slide.
Text Starting with your first slide, copy and paste
the corresponding text from your outline or transcribe the information.
You can use the toolbar near the top of the window to make adjustments to the size, weight,
color, and alignment of your text, and you can click and drag the textbox to reposition
it.
You can also add additional formatting like lists, bolding, and italics.
If you want to duplicate a textbox, right click and select Copy, then right click anywhere
on the slide and select Paste, or with the textbox selected, type command C and then
command V.
To make a new textbox, select the text tool in the toolbar and click and drag anywhere
on the slide.
Images If your slide layout already has an image,
you can select the image and then click “replace image” on the toolbar and then upload your
photo.
It will automatically scale and crop your image to fit into the image area.
Double clicking the image will allow you to resize the crop or reposition your image.
To add an image, click the insert image tool in the toolbar.
Shapes There are a variety of shapes available that
you can use to build simple graphics to represent your course info.
If there are existing shapes, you can select them and modify their appearance using the
tools in the toolbar.
If you have overlapping shapes and you need to change which one is on top, select one
of the shapes, click “arrange” and then select the appropriate position for that object.
A quick note for these elements.
You can easily duplicate text, images, and shapes by clicking and dragging an object
while holding down the option key.
Backgrounds If you want to change the background color,
or add a background image, right click any empty portion of the slide and select “Change
background”
Change layouts If you find you need to change how the information
is arranged on your slide, right click any empty portion of the slide, select “Apply
layout” and choose the layout that works best.
This will automatically keep your elements intact while rearranging them to match the
layout.
Step five, duplicate slides with similar layouts.
If you have two slides that require a similar layout, rather than rebuilding your slide
from the template every time, click and drag the slide you’d like to copy while holding
the option key.
Then you can edit the text, images, and shapes without having to worry about repositioning
or resizing anything.
Step six, build your transitions.
Once you’ve finished building your slides, click transition near the top of the window.
This will open the transition tab to the right of the slide area.
From here you can select and preview a number of different transitions.
Typically you’ll want to go with something basic like a fade or dissolve, but if your
brand is more playful and energetic, you could go with a transition that is more animated.
If you want to use the same transition for all of your slides, click the “Apply to
all slides” button.
Step seven, add your script.
If you’ve written a script for your lesson you can add your script to your speaker notes
to have it easily displayed when you later record your lesson.
Below your slide area you’ll see a window that says “Add speaker notes” Copy and
paste the text from your script into the speaker notes for the corresponding slide.
In a future video I’ll show you how to see this while recording your presentation.
Step eight, duplicate your presentation for the next lesson.
Even if your next lesson doesn’t require the same layouts, duplicating your first one
is going to save you some time because up to this point we haven’t deleted any used
or unused layouts.
Click file, and select make a copy.
You’ll be prompted to enter a new title, so follow the same formula as before and type
your module and lesson title.
When you click okay, your new presentation will open in a new tab.
Before moving on to edit this one, go back to your first lesson and now remove the unused
layouts.
Step nine, export your presentations.
While you can present directly from google slides, I recommend downloading your presentation
as a power point document.
The software on your computer that is designed to handle presentations is going to do a much
better job of displaying your graphics and transitions.
To export click file, download, and select Microsoft Power Point.
I recommend saving your file within a folder structure that matches your outline, where
your main folder is the course title, your secondary folder is the module, and the file
name is the lesson within that module.
Repeat this process until you’ve built all of your lessons, and you’re done!
At least with this stage.
We’ve still got recording, editing, and publishing to do, but don’t worry.
I’ll walk you through those steps in future videos.
If you have any questions about building slides, I’d love to hear them.
Just leave your questions in the comments below.
As always, thank you for taking the time to watch this video!
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See you next time!