I recently put out a survey asking you all what program you most wanted to learn about
and the answer was resoundingly clear, Genially. In fact, just before making this video, I got a DM
from a guy asking me if I had ever tried out this program called Genially. Now, I have to say I was
a little bit reluctant at first. I mean, how many presentation tools does a teacher actually need?
I've already got Google slides, PowerPoint, Canva, Prezi. You can even make presentations in Adobe.
But then I realized all these little elements that I'm always teaching people hacks for how
to do in those other programs, like make clickable elements, drag and drop, how to draw directly on
slides, how to add cool animations, all those are directly built in to Genially. So do you
really need another presentation tool? If you're going to use Genially, the answer might be yes.
Hey everyone, it's Sam Kary with New EdTech Classroom, and on this channel, we show you
everything you need to know about teaching with technology. Genially is a pretty robust program
with lots of different features and there's no way I could cover all of them in a single video.
So what I'm going to do in this video is start by teaching you how to make interactive
presentations. And all the tools I'm going to teach you for how to make an interactive
presentation will also apply to all the other types of creations that you can do in Genially.
Before we jump into the nuts and bolts, I'm just going to show you a couple of examples
so you can get an idea of what Genially is all about. First of all, you're going to notice that
Genially presentations are just significantly more eye-catching and they have different things like
animated texts and images that are going to grab students' attention. And then you can also use
Genially to make interactive images, and what you can do here is add different icons on top
of an image that then become clickable. And of course, teachers have also used Genially
in lots of creative ways, like making choice boards. So here you can see one where students
would be able to click on the different options and then some instructions are going to pop up
about what they would do. You can also use it to create these interactive escape room games,
where students would have to answer questions correctly in order to continue to move
through the presentation. Similarly, you can use Genially to set up these interactive quizzes,
and you can also use it to do things like make clickable infographics. Now,
another reason I think you should consider using Genially in your classroom is just that it can
also be a really powerful creativity tool, because you can show students how to do all of these
different types of creations as well. Depending on how you look at it, one potential downside of
Genially is that there's a lot going on in the program, so it can be a little bit difficult
to figure out exactly how to get started, and that's why you should start with pre-created
templates. However, before even checking out the pre-created templates, what you should
do first is go to the Inspiration tab and check out what other creations have already been made
by other educators. This tab is where I pulled all those examples I just showed you,
and if any of these creations has this blue Reuse button on it, that means the person who created
the original version is allowing you to use what they've already made as a template. Thanks,
that's very kind of you! So that would be one way that you can get some pre-created templates,
and we're going to go back here in just a moment, but another would be to go up to Create Genially
and then select any of the types of content that you want to create. Since this video is
about interactive presentations, I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And then you can also
search specifically for education templates here as well. There, you'll see a bunch of different
pre-created education templates that you can take, edit, and use however, you'd like. It is important
to note that if you see this little star on top of any Genially pre-created template, that does
indicate that it is part of the premium plan. Premium plans cost about five bucks in Genially,
so it's not super expensive, but it is important to note that you would need to pay to access some
of the templates here. Let's hop back over to the Inspiration tab and I'm going to choose this
digital story template to show you some of the key features of a Genially presentation. So again,
I'll click on it, click Use as Template, and then once I've pulled it up, you'll see
on the left-hand side of the screen, all of the individual slides in this presentation. To edit
elements on an individual slide, you just need to click on them, and then you'll see an editing menu
show up with traditional formatting tools like making the font bold, or or changing the color.
Now this slide obviously already has elements like text and images on it, so let's look at how
we can actually make those elements interactive or animate them to make them look more interesting.
When you click on the text, you'll see a menu with some different options pop up directly above it,
and one of them is this Animation tool. If you click on it, it's going to pull up a menu
where you can customize how the text appears on the screen. Now with Google Slides, for example,
you can really only animate texts and images when they first appear on the presentation.
But with Genially, you can make those animations ongoing to make it look more visually appealing.
For example, you can click to animate the text to be continually pulsing, you can make the text
flash like a notification, or you can do things like making it float up and down. Another cool
feature is that you can set the animations to trigger when you hover your mouse over them. I
particularly like this little Rotation animation, this Expand one, Wobble, as well as this Zoom one,
because they can help draw students' attention to text on the screen. Now, next to the animations
you're going to see an option to click on a pointing finger icon, and that's gonna allow
you to add interactivity to your slide. Now Genially gives you four options for making any
element interactive. You have a Tooltip, a Window, Go To Page, and Link. I'm going to hop over here
to a different slide in this presentation to take a look at how all of these work. So I'm
going to click on this hot air balloon, and then I'm going to select on that pointing finger again,
to make this hot air balloon clickable and interactive. I'm going to start with this
Tooltip interactivity, and that's going to allow me to add a little bit of text that's going to pop
up when a student clicks on the balloon. So here I'll just type the text that I want to pop up,
and then click save. And then to preview what it's going to look like, I'll click on the
Preview icon on the top right-hand side of the screen. So now you can see how the text just
pops out when I hover over the balloon, and when I click on this interactivity icon at the top,
you'll also notice that this presentation already has other interactive elements in it. Let's check
those out. So I'm going to exit Preview mode here and then click on Science. Then I'll click the
interactive icon, and there, rather than pulling up the menu, you'll see that it's going to show me
that this element already includes the Go To Page interactivity and that it's set to jump
to the fourth slide. Hit Preview again, click on Science, and you'll see that it jumps directly to
the Science page. Then clicking this home icon is going to return me back to the original page. One
way that you can use this Go To Page is to set up activities where students would be directed
to different pages depending on how they click. So let's say that you ask students to answer a basic
question here. What you could do is create a page that says, Correct Answer on it,
and then set up another page with some information to help reteach those concepts. And then when you
go back to your original quiz question page, you would select where you want students to click,
go to Interactivity, choose Go To Page, and then have that particular answer redirect to the page
where you want it to go. Then we could also go over to the Interactivity tab on the left-hand
side of the screen, select the home icon and make that home icon return back to the original quiz
question. So here in Presentation mode, you can see that if a student chooses the correct answer,
it's going to take them to a page that tells them that that answer is correct, whereas if they click
on the wrong answer, then it's going to take them to that page where they'll be able to get
some information to help reteach the concept. It is important to note that if you set up something
like this, you should treat it as a formative assessment, because there's no internal grading
system in Genially, and there's no real way for you to go check students' work. So it's more just
about them checking their own understanding and doing some self monitoring of their own learning.
I'll go to this next slide here and choose the image of the fairy, and then I'm going to choose
that interactivity icon again. This time though, I'm going to select Window, which is going to work
best if you have longer pieces of text. So let's say for example, that you wanted to give students
some background information about the history of fairies here, what you could do is just copy and
paste that text in, and then when a student clicks on it, an entire window of text is going to pop
up. So if you wanted a video to pop up instead of a piece of text, you would just select Link, paste
the link to a video that you want to pop up, and then click save, and then you'll see here
in Preview mode that when a student clicks on the text, a little video is going to pop up directly
on the screen, that they can click and watch. Now you can also add hyperlink interactivity to
a Genially presentation. So for example, if you wanted students to read more about what it means
to make a digital diary, just highlight the text, click Interactivity, select Link, and then just
copy and paste the URL to a webpage. I'd recommend leaving this Open in a New Tab setting on,
so that when a student clicks the link, it's going to pop up in a separate tab and then they'll be
able to easily navigate back to the original presentation. There are a few other things I
want to show you about Genially presentations, like how to create drag and drop activities,
how to draw directly on a Genially presentation, as well as how to embed audio. So let's hop back
over here to the main Genially dashboard, and I'm going to go up to the blue Create Genially
button. I'll click on Presentations again, and then I'm going to choose this STEM presentation
and select Use This Template. Here you'll notice when you choose a template, that you
have the option to either just bring in a single slide or select all. I'm just going to select all
here and then click Add to bring those into my own dashboard. You'll notice that this interface looks
exactly like the other one, and in addition to the slides that are already pre-created,
you can also click on this blue Add Page button to just add a new one. When I click on Add Page, it's
going to give me an option to either start from a blank page or to start with one of these pre
created slide templates. I'm just going to choose a blank one here to create my own from scratch,
so I can show you how some of these other tools work. Now on the top left-hand side of the screen,
you'll see that there's a text tool, and this is just going to allow me to bring in some different
types of texts with different fonts. And then I can just drag it around wherever I want it to go
and type out what I want to say. Beneath the text tool there's also an image tool, and here you can
search for images using tools like Pixabay and Unsplash. So I'm just going to look for one that
represents drawing here, and then I'll drag and drop that in as well. Beneath Images, you'll also
see there is a Resources tab and here's where you could pull in different icons and shapes, so I'll
just look for an icon that represents drawing and drag that in too. So what I'm going to do here is
bring in a square shape, and then I'm going to add some text above it that tells students to
draw a self portrait. Now, the default setting in Genially actually does not allow students to draw
on presentations. So to change that, you need to go up to the top right-hand side of the screen,
select Preferences, and then you'll need to turn on the option to paint on the Genially. Now in
Present mode, you'll see that there's a little drawing icon at the top, and when you click on it,
it's going to give you some different options for colors, and then students can use that digital
stylus to sketch out their self-portrait directly on top of the presentation. Next let's check out
how to make a drag and drop activity here. So this particular template would be a good one if we
wanted to have students do an activity where they drag the different icons around. So I'm just going
to change the text here quickly to let students know what they'll be doing for the activity,
and then I'll delete these extra elements that I think don't need. And then I'm just going to drag
these icons up to the top of the screen so that students will have to drag them and place them
on the map. Now to make them draggable, you're going to need to click on them and then choose
the little hand icon. And once that hand icon is colored blue, that means that that particular
element on the slide is now draggable. So now you can see that I can drag around these icons on the
map to show different places that represent my family heritage. Now, one last trick I want to
show you here is just how you can also embed audio directly into a Genially presentation.
So here you would want to go to the Insert tab, select Audio, and there you'll see that you have
an option to actually record audio directly in Genially. So you could hit that button,
record some instructions that you want to say for students to make this more accessible,
and then you'll see that that audio file is going to show up directly on this presentation. And in
Present mode, you'll see this little audio file that students can listen to in order to
hear instructions about the activity that you're asking them to do. Now, of course you could just
present this in front of students, but if you created a drag and drop, or a drawing activity,
then you're going to want to share the Genially directly with them. So the way that you're going
to do that is by going up to All Set. You're going to choose to publish this Genially presentation.
I'm just going to choose to publish it privately here, but if you have something that you want to
share with others, you can also choose to make it public. And then after clicking All Set,
you'll see that it's going to give you an option to share the presentation. If you click on that
three dots where it says Others, you'll notice that there's an option to share this
Genially to Google Classroom or to Microsoft Teams. Now, if you choose Google Classroom,
it's going to walk you through the process of creating the assignment, and what it's going to
do is put a link to a Genially presentation in the assignment that's in Google Classroom. Now,
the way that this is going to work is that when students open up Google Classroom, they're going
to click click on that link, and every time they click on the link, it's going to open up a new
Genially presentation. So going this route would be best if you just have some quick activities
that you want students to do. But if you want students to actually have their own templates
saved for them in Genially, then they are going to need to create a Genially account first. And then
what you can do is hover over that presentation, select Share To, and then you'll be able to enter
the email addresses of students that you want to share this template to. Note here that because my
demo student does not have a Genially account, it's not allowing me to share it with them as a
template. So that's why I say that students do need to have those accounts in order for you to
share it this way. But if you do want students to work on something over a more prolonged period of
time, then this would probably be a better option for you than sharing it via Google Classroom. If
you want to see how Genially compares to Google Slides, then be sure to check out that video
above. And if you're interested in learning more about how to take a strategic approach to teaching
with technology, then be sure to check out our free How to Teach with Technology Starter Kit.
You can get it at newedtechclassroom.com/starter kit. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next video!