Quick introduction to adding images in Google Slides
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Ed Tech, World Languages and More!
I did a training a few weeks ago and someone asked me what my “favorite” tools were. I thought it was a great question, so here’s what I can’t live without on a daily basis.
Google Slides is doing such a good job of wooing me right now.
On Monday I posted about being able to add videos straight from your Drive. I was so excited I didn’t even notice that if you click once it brings up a “video options” sidebar where you can:
Google announced a new feature and I am ecstatic. You now can add videos directly from your Google Drive! They don’t have to be on YouTube!!! (If you’re on a school Google account, this feature may not be available just yet depending on how your administrator has set up for rolling out new features. Just give it a week or two. You’ll know because when you click on Insert>Video there will be a choice that says Google Drive.)
Why would we want to do this? Endless awesome reasons.
In this example I added a video to a third slide of my prepositions Interactive Slides.
If you school is like mine, Valentine’s day is a difficult day to get anything done with the constant interruptions of singing grams and Valentine’s deliveries and no one can see because one kid has a bouquet of balloons that covers half of the class and half the class is all hopped up on chocolates or grumpy because they don’t have a balloon, singing gram or chocolates.
This is a super simple Valentine’s activity you can use in all levels.
Materials:
Et voilà, each student has a nice Valentine’s day heart with lovely sentences about them. I had students who would keep this in the front of the binder for the rest of the year.
I’ve been working on a presentation on reading strategies and updated my “Open Mind” Template for Google Slides. An “Open Mind” activity is pretty simple. Students insert words or images into the mind of a character or person they’ve been reading about. (For example for Romeo Montague a student could put a heart and say that Romeo is in love.) This works particularly well for language learners because they can insert an image and then talk about why they chose that image. Since it’s a Google slide, you could also have students do it collaboratively- two working on it at the same time or even put several in a slide deck and ask students to fill in for different characters and then students could guess which character was which or explain to each other why they think those particular images were chosen. Students can justify their answer in the speaker notes portion of the slides.
I’ve included two templates in the slide deck. One is a basic open mind and the second is a “says, does, and thinks” where students separate out what the character says, does and thinks. I also like this one for language learners because it gives them practice using structures like “he thinks that…” “she says that…” If you were working on the subjunctive you could also use for wants and wishes. So much fun!
Click on the photos to make a copy of the Open Mind Template.
Quick introduction to Google Keep
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I thought this prompt of free tools was intriguing and I encourage you to read Musicuentos.com post, “Supporting the Community.”
My absolute favorite free web tool is Google Image Search. It revolutionized my lessons- being able to pull in images on anything at any given time. But that’s not a very interesting or unique tool. (However, if it went away I would cry.)
My real free tool is Edpuzzle.com. This has also revolutionized my lessons. Edpuzzle allows me to add questions to video, either uploaded by me or pulled from any number of sources, including YouTube. I can have students watch a video at home and ask them comprehension questions about it. I can differentiate the same video and have a challenge version. It links to my Google Classroom so all of my students are enrolled and I can see who has or hasn’t watched the video. I can make it so they can’t skip ahead; I can make it so they can. I love the versatility of Edpuzzle.com to add in authentic videos with questions.