Work smarter not harder
Quizlet has a feature that they call “diagram.” It’s pretty darn cool. You upload a photo and then place dots on it and student identify the dots. The implications for language learners to practice identifying vocabulary are clear. Here I am using it not so much as a “diagram,” but as practice for vocabulary for a story. But I am also going to use my diagram for a speaking activity and possibly some Bingo because who doesn’t love a game of Bingo?
I’ve got enough stuff to do besides giving myself more work, so here’s a “hack” you can use to make it go faster.
For this hack, I’m assuming that you are also teaching this vocabulary somewhere and that this likely involves a slide deck or Powerpoint. I like when I can reuse something multiple times in multiple ways because it feels like time well spent making whatever I needed to make. Did you know you can download individual slides as a jpg? That you can then load into Quizlet saving you hours of time? You can!
Make a slide
We’re going to import lots of images using the Explore tool and I like everything nice and neat so I first made a table. The pictures won’t actually go in the table, but it will keep them nice and neat. Choose the number of rows and columns.
Use the Explore Tool
If you are not already using the Explore Tool in Google Slides to find your images you are doing too much work. Click on Tools>Explore Tool and search for what you need. Click on “Images” to get a wonderful selection. The search button isn’t like regular Google search so if you want a cartoon search something like: writing cartoon, or writing png. That will help narrow it down to cartoons. Click the plus sign to insert into your slide. Repeat.
Bonus: My slide is actually a speaking activity to be done with partners. I’ll show you what I did in my workflow.
Download Your Slide and Upload to Quizlet
You need a file for your Quizlet, so click on File>Download and choose .jpg. Then upload that to Quizlet and add your dots et voilà, you’ve quickly made a diagram out of another activity. #multitasking
Last week I published a workflow of my slides and it seemed well received. (Nobody threw virtual tomatoes, anyways.) So here’s another which shows how I also made this into a speaking activity.
Link to the Interactive Slide itself.
