YOUR MINUTES || 5 WAYS GOOGLE SLIDES TRANSFORMED MY CLASSROOM
Welcome to another Your Minutes post that features YOU! Here you will see educators sharing how they spend their minutes doing what they do best.
Haley impressed me from the moment I met her. Her quest for best practices and constant refining of her methods is refreshing! It is a joy to collaborate with her, and after watching two years of her exciting explorations and taking on Pandemic pedagogy like a champ, I knew I needed her to share her insights with you. While hopefully most of us can say goodbye to online teaching this coming year, these tips and and examples will be just as valuable in an in-person setting. And, though it’s a longer post than I usual, I couldn’t cut a thing from it. Haley’s ideas are golden!
When my school switched to asynchronous (excepting weekly check-ins) virtual learning last March, I knew I needed to find a mode of conveying information that was not only engaging, but also as clear and as scaffolded as possible. I wanted to be able to present information a little bit at a time, to make materials organized, interactive, and tactile, and to allow collaboration among students. The Google slides application has allowed me to do all of this and more, whether I’m teaching virtually, in-person, or both at once. Read on to hear about five of my favorite ways of implementing Google Slides into my classroom routines, and know that the possibilities are endless!
1. Daily Agendas
These slideshows, posted each morning, have become a staple of my classroom. Each agenda contains a numbered list of each of the day’s movements, outlining everything from announcements and prayer, to assignment descriptions, to homework reminders. Videos are hyperlinked, timers are embedded, partners and groupings are pre-determined and posted - saving valuable class time. I screen share these slides for our Zoomer friends, so that we can progress through class together. These agendas are a lifesaver for students who are virtual, absent, or tardy, and provide an excellent structural component for in-person students who want to know what to expect from class each day. They make my life easier as well - no more opening ten tabs throughout a class period, no more setting timers on my phone, no more forgetting to check homework - everything I need is right there in one place.
Fully virtual teaching Daily Agenda example hybrid teaching Daily Agenda example
2. Interactive Note-Taking
The Pear Deck add-on for Google Slides was my saving grace in the spring! This extension allows teachers to make engaging slideshows that create opportunities for quick (and fun!) informal checks for understanding. With this add-on, you can insert multiple choice, text answer, and number answer questions into any slideshow, for students to answer. Moreover, with a premium account, you can incorporate free draw slides, embed full webpages, insert click-and-draggable icons, add audio, and more. These slides can be released to your class (by way of a hyperlink or session access code) as “student paced” or “teacher paced,” with the former being a great option for synchronous, in class discussions, and the latter a lifesaving solution to asynchronous instruction! Sessions can always be saved and referred back to at any point in the future.
8th grade example 7th grade example 6th grade example
3. Collaborative Activities
When virtual learning began, one question at the forefront of my mind was: How in the world are my students going to collaborate with one another from 6 feet apart? Shared materials and group work had been all but eliminated from my classroom. However, Google Slides saved the day again! With easily navigable slides (unlike long documents that take forever to scroll through), shared editing capabilities (20 students can be working on the same slideshow simultaneously), and capacity to contain videos, images, text boxes, drawings, and more, slides quickly became an integral mode of collaboration. One of my favorite slides activities is Jigsaws. Groups of students are assigned to a particular section of slides to create or edit. After a certain period of time, the groups are shuffled, so that there is one “expert” from each of the different sections in each group. Then, each new group completes the same slide or set of slides, which is a combined review of all of the topics covered in the rest of the slideshow. In a similar vein, we used collaborative slideshows to construct our classroom covenants earlier this year. This is a productive way to make sure everyone’s voice is heard, while still maximizing class time. Students can be as creative as they want and can happily work with a group, all while a safe distance apart.
Jigsaw example Classroom Covenant Creation
4. Virtual Manipulatives
Yet another setback to the COVID-era classroom: no shared materials! Given the importance of hands-on and tactile learning, this was a major concern of mine this year. With Google slides’ image, drawing, shape, and text box options, it’s a piece of cake to create manipulatives that can be clicked and dragged all over the screen as needed, to nearly the same effect. In my math class, we’ve used virtual tangrams, built sandcastles, balanced equations on scales, and more. There is always a way to transform a physical manipulative to a virtual one, if we can just think creatively enough!
Sandcastle project Hands-On Equations
5. Scaffolded Materials
Google slides are ideal for creating step-by-step project packets, assignments, graphic organizers, and more. Unlike Google docs, you don’t have to worry about margins or text wrapping, or waste time with columns and headers and footers. Just insert text boxes, borders, graphics, and you’re good to go! One of my favorite time savers is to screenshot parts of a pre-made activity that I like and insert them into my own = document where I can edit them as needed. I also love that you can insert material in the space outside of the slides themselves. I often use this space for directions and tips, leaving the slide open for material. As an added bonus, Google Slides are very straightforward for virtual learners to edit - they can add their own text boxes and type directly into the slides.
Business Owner Project Popcorn Task Linear Equations Graphic Organizer
Proportional Relationships Graphic Organizer Material Organization Routine Setting
These five strategies, developed in response to teaching virtually in the spring, have become absolutely essential to my hybrid classroom this last year. I know that my planning, instruction, and assessment have all benefited from this resource, and I’m sure my students would agree. They rely on their Daily Agendas to guide them through the day, love the freedom that Pear Deck provides, and approach projects with excitement and confidence when given a clearly scaffolded packet to complete. I hope that this post inspires you to give at least one of these new methods a try - you won’t regret it!
MEET HALEY
My name is Haley Schilly, and I just finished my second year of teaching middle school math at St. Mary of Carmel Catholic School in Dallas, TX. After growing up in Charlotte, NC, I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019 with degrees in Psychology and Public Policy, and I am a current M.Ed. candidate at the University of Notre Dame, through the ACE Teaching Fellows program. I am passionate about research, problem solving, curriculum development, and SEL, as well as running, baking, and crafting, but nothing brings me more joy than my wonderful tween-aged students!