Hi, my name is Sam Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech
Classroom where I provide ideas and tips for how to use education technology. In
my previous video, I showed how I lesson plan with Google Slides in order to help
myself stay organized, visually reinforce directions for students, as
well as present information in a more engaging way. In this video, I'm going to
teach you 4 expert tips for how you can take your Google Slides
presentations to the next level. To teach you some tips for how to take your
Google Slides to the next expert level, I'm going to show you a presentation
that I recently presented to a group of new teachers. On these slides you'll see
four strategies that I use to make my Google Slides significantly better. Let's
look at the first strategy, which is to use a third-party application to bring
in some additional templates. By far my favorite is Slidesmania. Slidesmania has a
ton of different types of slides templates that you can use for free. One
of the many great things about Slidesmania is that they're always upgrading
their templates so there's new stuff to choose from on pretty much a weekly
basis. I like to go to the 'Education' tab and here you'll see tons of different
templates. For example, you have templates for different holidays, colorful
templates, you could search for themes. So, for example, if I wanted to search for
technology, I could look for a specific technology template. Really the options
are absolutely endless. After you find a template that you like all you have to
do is click it and download it into your Google Slides. I click 'Download for
Google Slides,' 'Make a Copy,' and then you'll see that I now have a new
template available to use. The slide template that I used in the presentation
I just showed you is the Gasper free presentation template. It's super
colorful, I absolutely love it, and I always get great feedback when I
use it. The next tip to add a little bit more fun to your Google Slides is to add
a Bitmoji. Bitmoji is a free app that's available for Android or for iOS devices
that allows you to create an avatar and then gives you all kinds of different
actions that your avatar is engaged in that can really spice up your Google
Slides and make them significantly more engaging and fun. After you've set up and
created your Bitmoji, you're going to go to the Chrome Web Store. From there type
in 'Bitmoji' and you'll see that there's a free Chrome extension. Once you install
it, it will show up in your Chrome browser. Now if I'm back on my google
Slide and I want to add a Bitmoji to my slide, for example, maybe I just want to
say, "Hello," I click the Chrome extension, search for something I'm looking for,
like "Hello," and you'll see that a bunch of different avatars of myself show up.
All you have to do is drag that avatar into your presentation, you can move it
around,
resize it as necessary. Putting a Bitmoji in your slide isn't increasing the rigor
of your lesson, but it's a small thing you can do to increase student joy
factor in your classroom and students will appreciate that you're having a
little bit of fun and that you're showing that you have a sense of humor.
As I showed in the first video about lesson planning with Google Slides, it's
really easy to insert pictures by going to 'Insert,' 'Image,' 'Search the Web,' and then
you have access to all of Google images in order to drag and drop pictures into
your Google Slides presentations. Now if you want to become a real Google Slides
expert, what you want to do is mix up the type of multimedia that you're including
and start to drop in things like GIFs. The easiest way to do this is by adding
the Giphy Chrome extension to your browser and just like we did with
Bitmoji, dragging and dropping GIFs into your Google Slides presentation. So the
way, again, that you're going to do this is by going to the web store, here search
'Giphy,' the top extension is 'Giphy for Chrome,' you want to add 'Giphy for
Chrome' to your browser. Once you add it, you'll see that it shows up as a Chrome
extension. Go back to your Google Slide, click on the extension, and here you can
search for the type of emotion that you're going for. So if you want to
convey excitement, you could click 'Excite,' find a GIF that you like,
literally drag and drop it into your presentation, and you'll have an animated
GIF directly into your Google Slides. Again, not improving the rigor of a
lesson, but it's another small step you can take to increase the joy factor and
get a little bit more buy in and engagement from your students. The last
and most important tip is to make your Google Slides interactive. Adding Pear
Deck to your Google Slides so that students can live respond to the
questions you're asking will significantly increase engagement
and move your students from just being passive observers to active
participators in all parts of your lesson. Pear Deck is a free add-on. The
way that you add Pear Deck to your Google Slides is by going to the Add-ons,
there select 'Get Add-ons,' here I click 'Pear Deck.' After you've installed Pear
Deck, you'll see that it pops up a menu on the right-hand side of your Google
Slides. I'll go back to the demo slide I was using. Here I'll first go to the
'Add-ons,' select 'Pear Deck,' 'Open Pear Deck Add-on.' Now there could be a whole separate
tutorial just about how to use Pear Deck, but here I want to show you how to ask a
question that students can live respond to so that you can also see the answers
as they're responding. So what I'm gonna do is actually write the question
directly on to my slide. So here I'll make a box,
I'll ask, "How are you feeling today?" And what I want to do here is go to the 'Ask
Students a Question' option, I'm going to click a 'Text' question, click 'Update Slide,'
it will tell you that it's adding an interactive question, and then you'll see
the question pop up underneath. The way you'll have students interact with a
Pear Deck lesson through Google Slides is a little bit different than the way
you would normally do it. You'll want to go to 'Present Lesson.' After you've
created a free account, you're gonna click 'Start Presentation.' There you'll
see a URL that you need to direct students to, joinpd.com. Once they go to
joinpd.com, they'll enter the specific class code that will allow them to get
into their presentation. So let's look at what this would look like from a
student's perspective. Okay so I just went to joinpd.com, I'm going to enter
the code. Once I've entered the code I'll see that there's a box where I can
type in my answer, "I'm feeling great." Then as a teacher I can go back to my Google
Slide, click on the Pear Deck question below, and there I will see that
one student that entered the class has responded. I can show those responses and
that will actually project on to the screen for all students to see if I
choose to do this. Now again, this is just one of many ways that you can use Pear
Deck. It's a really awesome tool to get students to respond live to questions
that you're asking so that they're interacting with the lessons you've
created. So there you go, four tips for how to take your Google Slides to the
expert level. Use third-party templates from Slidesmania, add a Bitmoji to
your slide for a little bit of fun, use different types of multimedia like GIFs,
and definitely add that free Pear Deck add-on so that students can respond live
to their questions that you're asking in class. Thank you so much for watching my
video. If you found it helpful, please hit the like button, and if you'd like to see
more of my education technology tutorials check out those other videos
and subscribe to my channel. Thanks and have a great week!