The Grade 2s ceated posters about the National Symbols, using Google Slides

The Grade 2s recently created presentations about South Africa using Google Slides. Today I wanted to see if they could remember seven of the national symbols and present them neatly, each with an image, as a poster in Google Slides.  

Skills focus

• copy and paste
• search images
• find a suitable image and paste it into Google Slides
• create a light-coloured, abstract background
• resize images

Examples of the finished products

The examples below are from Julian, Kayla and Kaleb (the students always use their online names for anything that goes online in ICT).

 

Good work, Grade 2!

Use Remote for Slides - a useful Chrome extension

Have you ever noticed the 'Present with Remote' button when you work in Google Slides? Well, I discovered today that the Remote for Slides Chrome extension works with that on your phone when you present using Googl Slides.  I have just installed the extension from the Chrome Web store.

What is Remote for Slides?

" Remote for Slides is a Chrome Extension and a Progressive Web App that allows you to control Google Slides and Ludus on any device, remotely, without the need for any extra hardware."

How do I use Remote for Slides with Google Slides?

Open a presentation in Google Slides.
On the top right, click the " Present with Remote" button.
Wait until the presentation fully loaded.
Click on the "Show ID & Start Remote" button to view the 6-digits code..
Open s.limhenry.xyz on another device and enter the code on the page.
You are ready to go!

One downside of using Remote for Slides

You can only see controls like next slide and Previous slide. You can't open external links.  Nevertheless, this is a really handy Chrome exptension

Our Grade 3 'What happens next?' stories

Can you add an ending to any of our stories?

My Grade 3 class has been having such a lot of fun with prepare preparing for International Dot Day.which is on the 15th September 2018. What has made it an extra amount of fun is that we are part of a team blog with classes 3 other countries - Australia Canada and the United States and we are all doing fun writing and other activities together, connected related to Dot Day.

If you take a peek at our collaborative blog you will see that one of the activities is Connect the Dot stories. My Grade 3 class has done a variation of this activity and we have called it 'What happens next?'

This is how we went about the lesson.

• We all listened to Peter Reynolds reading the DOT STORY (we unfortunately do not have the book yet).As we listened to the story we wrote down words that had caught our attention during the reading of the story, on a piece of paper.
• After that we chose 3 or 4 of our words, plus we added 2 random words that were not in the story, and we swapped papers.
• Whoever received the new set of words needed to write a story using those words. The story needed to end with 'What happens next'.
• We did this lesson using a collaborative Google slides presentation. We used two slides from the Slides Carnival free template Eglamour because the template contained two lovely dot slides.

We had fun reading each other's stories. However we did not have time to write about what happens next. Can you help us? If you would like to help us just add the the name of the story in the comment ox along with another few sentences. We would love that!

Here are our stories:

 

Google Slides: Create an e-book using Google Slides

Google Slides is a great for creating e-books.  We created them as part of a Natural Disasters project in Grade 7.  Each students chose a different project. I outlined the instructions in Google Classroom.

This is what we did:
First we created the template for the e-book as shown below. https://goo.gl/kKJss7

The task
I provided the task in a Google Doc and we discussed it at length https://goo.gl/UwyyFu . We also revised how to research and how to provide links to the material used.

Examples
The students did these really well. Here are a few examples:

Google Slides: Make a cheat sheet

When I came across @cogswell_ben's superb Google Cheat Sheets I realised that these are a great example of a different way of using Google Slides.  Ben has kindly given these a Creative Commons license so that they can be reused. One can't embed them but if you click on the images below you'll be taken to the originals. However, this is such a useful way of providing tutorials to students. 

CLICK ON THE IMAGES

https://goo.gl/GSJCh7

https://goo.gl/hZuGz1 

https://goo.gl/zjcrQT

https://goo.gl/EDylt6

This concept is so useful for creating documents for students to use in the classroom.  It is definitely worth pursuing the topic of Hyperdocs! Visit Ben's blog https://goo.gl/OqQh1M 

Google Slides: Publish a Google Slides story in different ways on the Internet

Google Slides is great for writing stories. One can use half a slide for the story and the other half for the illustration.  My Grade 5 class took part in a writing project with two schools in other countries - one in the USA and one in Argentine. We wrote collaborative stories, with my class working in groups of three and starting the story. We were also responsible for the final editing and the illustrations. We used a purchased program that is no longer available to do the illustrations.

It can also be presented online as a Google slideshow as illustrated below. However, the great thing about writing a story in Google Slides is that it can be downloaded as PDF and then uploaded to a variety of free online sites such as Slideboom, Slideshare and Youblisher among others.   The example below shows the story in Google Slides as a presentation and then in Youblisher as an e-book.

a) As a Google online slideshow



b) In Youblisher.com as an e-book
Click on the image below to be taken to Youblisher.com http://goo.gl/QPd6Nn

Google Slides: How to make a brochure using Google Slides

Google Slides is a great tool to use for making a six-sided brochure.  I decided to try it out with my Grade 5 class. They were learning about the heritage sites in South Africa in Social Sciences.

The task
Create a six-sided brochure showing two important heritage sites in South Africa that you would like to visit.

This is how I went about it

1. I created a template and uploaded this to a shared folder in Google Drive. All I did was divide two slides into three and added a guide for the answers. These division lines can be removed when printing. (The presentation below shows the template)
2. I put the link to this shared folder into Google Classroom so to ensure an easier workflow.  The students had to make their own copies which would automatically go to the shared folder as first option. 
3. I also added the link to a Google Document I had created with some brief information as a guide for the class https://goo.gl/TZqDU4 . 

Google Slides work really well for making a brochure. Until I have some completed work to show I'll use this image from https://goo.gl/kJtAVr.

Getting started with a collaborative Google Slides presentation in Grade 5

This year I wanted to introduce a Grade 5 class to Google Slides in a collaborative way. Last year, with this class, we did a lot of work using Microsoft PowerPoint. I have to say that Microsoft PowerPoint is still one of my favourite applications for all time mainly because of all the different ways you can use it - but using it collaboratively is really not easy at all. Google Slides offers that benefit - so it is becoming a firm favourite.

Lesson goals

I wanted the students to:

• experience how easy it is for a whole class to use one Google document at the same time 
• learn how to share the finished product to their own Google accounts 
• complete the task at home if they didn't finish 
• learn the inns and outs of images, fonts, and background colour

Giving the assignment

Naturally, I created the lesson using Google Classroom. The students opened their Google accounts and logged on to Google Classroom and away we went!

The task
The class had to open the slide presentation I had created and shared in Google Classroom. It had an example slide. Their task:

• add a slide and create something similar 
• write an acrostic poem description of themselves using adjectives 
• add an avatar image they had created in a previous lesson and crop it 
• add their names using WordArt 
• use colour for their selected fonts 
• colour the background

The results 
The class enjoyed this task and they loved looking at each others' completed slides.

Other collaborative lesson ideas for Google slides
Here are three ideas I want to try soon:

• Do a collaborative project in groups 
• Write a collaborative story using Google slides
• Learn how to organise research on a collaborative slide presentation (idea via Richard Byrne's blog)

Google Slides #2: Insert a video

If you are making a presentation using Google Slides, you will sometimes want to add a video. Currently on Google slides there is no way to insert a video stored directly on your computer. You will need to host your video on YouTube or use another YouTube video. 

Inserting a video that is not hosted on YouTube
If you wanted to use a video that is not on YouTube you could host it elsewhere or upload your video to Google Drive and share it to anyone with the link can view . The Google Slides user help Guide indicates that Slides only take YouTube videos but can link to other videos. On the Google Docs Help forum someone offers this work around to linking another online video:
Here is the work around. 

1. Save your video to your Google drive

2. Click share on the video and copy the url link

3. Then in Slides; click Insert then Link...

4. Name your video (this will be displayed on your slide)

5. Paste the link.This will allow you to easily get to your video. 

Inserting a video that is hosted on YouTube
This post shows how to insert a YouTube video to a slide.

1. Open your presentation and click on the Insert/Video link on your Google Slides menu.
The video insert link appears on your slide. Add your YouTube video URL and click on search

YouTube immediately locates the video and adds it to the slide

2. Click on the video  thumbnail and choose select if it is the correct video.

Your video is embedded and can now be enlarged to fit to the page.  Once your video is embedded you can publish your presentation to the web and whoever views it will be able to view the video as well.

.
It is so quick and easy!

Quick video tutorial
Here is a short 1 minute YouTube video from PMS Ross showing this process

Google Slides #1: A cheat sheet for using Google Slides (via Shake Up Learning)

One of my favourite bloggers, Kasey Bell from Shake Up Learning, has created posted a wonderful cheat sheet on Google Slides in Scribd. She has very kindly given this a Creative Commons license so as a result I am embedding it in this post. Head over to her blog to see the original post:  Google Slides CHEAT SHEET! (Free Download) Kasey says, "This Google Slides Cheat Sheet will give teachers and students an overview of the NEW Slides Home Screen, as well as a good overview of the available features in the menu and toolbar.

Google Slides Cheat Sheet by kbell6