Interactive Slide Ideas

 

Welcome to the 21st Century K Podcast. I'm Hannah, I teach elementary school and I help other teachers bridge the gap between traditional elementary and 21st century expectations. This week, we're going to wrap up our series of tips and tricks on using interactive slides in the classroom with a full-on list of all the ways you might be able to use interactive slides in your classroom, starting today. Thanks for joining. If you've been with me for the last few weeks, you have been picking up new tips and tricks for using interactive slides in the classroom. It's kind of become my thing, and when I started working on this podcast episode, that's when it really hit me how much I rely on all the different types of slides I've created in the classroom every single day, from communicating with families to guiding myself through lessons, to assigning things to my students, to my lesson plans. I am a slide debt girl through and through and I'm super excited to round out this series of tips and tricks with a list of ways that you might be inspired to use interactive slides in your classroom, starting today. Maybe the first way that I use interactive slides is lesson planning. I have created some background templates that I add to a slide deck to put my text boxes over top and fill in my lesson plans every single week. 

A few years ago, I was a paper pencil only lesson planning girl. I love to bring my spiral book home the big one that took up the whole desk. I would bring it home and I would get my number two mechanical pencil and I would write everything in over the weekend. When I got really good at budgeting my time, I would write my lesson plans on Wednesdays ahead of time. Then, when the book just wasn't working for me anymore, I designed my own templates and printed them out and I hand wrote on my lesson plan pages. But when I started teaching online, it just seemed redundant. I needed to access my resources digitally, and so writing them was an extra step that I just didn't have time for, and that's when I switched over to lesson planning using Google Slides. I've also used Google Sheets, and if you love Google Sheets, then there's so many cool things you can do to lesson plan with Google Sheets. But I love the ease of creating a background template, putting it on a slide deck and then adding my text and links over top of that. 

The best part about lesson planning with Google Slides is that you can share it with your administrators and teammates and it's there for you. Year after year. I just make a copy of the same slide deck, adjust the dates and then adjust my plans as I go along every week. As long as I'm teaching the same grade, I have my lesson plans there for me. In fact, I share my kindergarten and fourth grade lesson plan with Google Slides every Sunday over on my Instagram account at 21st Century EK, if you're interested in checking those out. 

The other way that I use slides to help myself is by creating a personal calendar slide that I keep with my lesson plans. I also keep a slide in my lesson plan deck that has list rosters for each of my classes, that has a master's schedule and information about when my morning duty is, my afternoon responsibilities and everything in between, so that if a coworker needed to access it to help a sub or to plan something in the event I can't be there, they can find whatever they need right in that slide deck. The next way that I use slides is that daily focus slide that I've talked so much about. That is just crucial to my success. When I'm actually in the classroom teaching. I refer to those slides multiple times every single day. I use the links to project books and other slide deck resources that my students will use and then I turn around and give them and their families access so that when they need that information they can get it. I link it in my email every single day. 

I use slide decks for more than just communicating that sort of information to families. I set up a Google website for my team this year and we have slides with information about each subject each day of the week. So when parents click that link, they're taken to a slide in present mode that shows them what each teacher is covering. It has links to resources that families can use and information that parents might need to know for the week. The great part about this is we send the same link to families every single day, but it's a live link because we send it in present mode and when we go in and make changes and they go in and click, they can see what we've changed. Saves a lot of time on our end and we don't have to keep recreating links for our families to get to information that we wanna share. We have another slide deck that's very similar, with news and information from the school level, from our assistant principal's newsletter all the way down to our school handbook and our breakfast and lunch menus, so when parents access that slide deck, they have buttons and links that take them to all of those things. It's been super useful this year. 

Then I use my slides to actually teach. My favorite part of teaching kindergarten is calendar time, and so I have calendar slide decks to cover all the math standards and then some. I love spending time with my students every morning going through the routines. I have linked YouTube videos and songs that we enjoy every single day. Now that I teach the big kids, though, I created a slide deck for them. They come in every morning, they go to Google Classroom, they pull up their calendar, there's a mood tracker and a weather tracker and a planner where they can learn to manipulate those things and use it as they choose. I really think they enjoy it actually every day. And then I also use interactive slides for teaching and reviewing literacy skills and lots of other things. Along with my kindergarten curriculum, I've got a slide for each subject so that I know what I'm teaching each unit and my links for videos and resources are right there. And then I have those trusty library slides that I found, and some that I created during the pandemic, that just have links to gobs and gobs of books and videos and games that are all thematic based. I can find one of those for just about every week of the school year and it just adds another layer of resources in my bag of tricks for teaching that week. 

Now that I teach older kids, I assign Google Slides in Google Classroom every single week On Wednesdays. We call it workbook Wednesdays and my students can practice reading online and answering questions online. I like using slide decks because of the ease of making a background they can't manipulate and then adding text boxes that they can type in and that I can go in and check and respond and help them as they learn to work online. I also can assign other slide decks for my students online. They have a weekly planner and choice board slide where they can show me the extra things they're doing to go above and beyond, and they can keep themselves on track by checking off tasks as they complete them for the week. 

There are really so many ways to use interactive slides in the classroom. Once you jump in and start imagining the possibilities, I am super excited to be right along your side as you begin to use interactive slides in your classroom, and I have just the thing to help you do it. If you're feeling afraid of making your own background images, don't worry. I have a new set of over 100 background images that you can copy and paste right into your own slide decks to create everything from lesson plans to to-do list, to daily slides and to interactive activities for your students. All you have to do is pop them in, add the text, add the links, add the images on top and you're ready to go. 

Maybe you're feeling really confident and you're ready to start creating your own interactive slides to use in your classroom. Don't worry, I have got you covered. I have three new resources created just for you, and they're all linked in the show notes. The first is a free ebook on how to get the most out of using interactive slides in your classroom. It's the three easiest things I can think of to take your slide deck use to the next level. The next link is going to be to a brand new resource. It's over 100 daily slide background templates that you can use to immediately start adding pictures, text and hyperlinks and get going right away. And the third is a brand new mini course that is set to be released in October of 2023 that teaches you how to create your own interactive slides for use in your classroom or for resale in your own online business. I cannot wait to hear from you and I cannot wait to learn alongside you as we tackle interactive slides together. 

Hey, have you ever thought about making your own interactive slide decks? Maybe the thought has you feeling overwhelmed because you don't understand the technology, or there are just so many options you don't even know where to begin. Well, don't worry, I've got you. I am working on an interactive slides masterclass, a one-time course you can take at your own pace to learn all the tips and tricks I know for creating interactive slide decks that you and your students will love. We'll talk about how to create interactive slides like my calendars and literacy reviews, and also daily focus slides that you can use in your classroom every day of the school year. We'll even talk about how you can come up with your own ideas to create slides that you can sell yourself. I mean, if we're going to do all this work for our own classrooms, why not help other teachers and make a little passive income on the side, right? CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

Linking Interactive Slides

Welcome to the 21st Century K podcast. I'm Hannah, I teach elementary school and I help other teachers bridge the gap between traditional elementary and 21st century expectations. In this episode, we're continuing on in our series with tips and tricks for using interactive slides in the classroom, and today it's all about links. Thanks for joining. Are you ready to jump in and start making your own slide decks? Are you ready to take your interactive slide game to the next level? Well, I am here for you. Check out the show notes to find links to my new free ebook with the three easy ways you can start using interactive slides in your classroom today, including some of the things we've talked about on the podcast. You can also link to a brand new resource that is over 100 pre-designed coordinated slide deck backgrounds. There are some for every season and holiday. You can use them for lesson planning, for desktop backgrounds, for student activities, daily slides whatever you can dream up you can create with these pre-made backgrounds. Maybe you are really ready to jump in, but you need a little help and guidance. I've got you there too. Be sure to sign up on the wait list for my new course interactive slides master class that will be coming out in October 2023. Sign up on the list so that you'll be the first to know when it's ready. 

Welcome back on our series of episodes with tips and tricks for using interactive slides in the classroom. Two weeks ago, we talked about using daily focus slides and how I started using them back during the pandemic and continue to use them teaching in person, to keep my lessons on track and focus and to keep my online resources right there at the click of a button. Last week, we talked about sharing those slides with stakeholders, from administrators to subs, to co-teachers and even to students and families. Today, we're going to backtrack a little, because maybe you haven't started using interactive slides or maybe you need to up your slide game. So this episode is all about links and how to add links to your slides and what to link so that you can get what you need in one click of your mouse. 

So if you're using slides for teaching, whether it be to organize your daily lessons or to create lesson plans, you really just need to hyperlink text. So if it's for the teacher, for instance, I use a slide deck for my lesson planner. I have a template and I create text boxes and I type in what I'm doing for each part of each day each week, and so sometimes I want to link up a website or a video or even another slide deck or another place within my Google Drive. To do this, all you have to do is add a text hyperlink. You highlight the text that you want to become your clickable button, if you will, and then you click the link button. Or you could right click and add a hyperlink and then you paste in the address of wherever it is you want that link to go. So that would be, I think, the best way to link something within lesson plans. Now, if it's for display, like your daily slides or something that you might send to parents or students, you most certainly can link text in this way. But another thing you can do is link an entire text box. So if it's something that has a lot of text in it, you can highlight and link the text, but you know it turns it blue and puts the line under it. It kind of changes the aesthetic of your slide. So if you will just select the text box and then add your link in the same way, it will make the entire text box a link so that when they click on the box it will take them wherever it is that you want them to go or that you want to go. 

The other way to add a link easily is to add a hyperlink to an image, and I do this a lot. I do this in my daily email when I link the screenshot of my daily slides. I do this sometimes in my lesson plans. If I've created a little button and I want that button to go somewhere, I might add a hyperlink to an image. I do it a lot with my daily slides. So if we have books that we're going to read for the week, or if we have another slide in our slide deck that I want to make a button or an image for, then I would link the graphic on the slide. It's just the same as linking text. So you highlight whatever image you want to create a link for and then you can click the link button in your menu, or you can right click, add a link and put it in that way, or two fingers click. 

If you're working on a Chromebook with a touchpad and maybe you're not a right clicker anymore, that's kind of going away, I think, because people are not using mice regularly, so the two finger click is just as important as the right click anymore. So that would be how you could add a link to your images. So if you're sharing with students maybe you have every week I have a little bookshelf on my daily slides and I just go to Google and I copy images that are the cover of the books that I'm going to use. I find the best videos on YouTube or record my own, and then I go back and link those to the image of the book cover so that when my students or I or their families click the picture of the book cover, it takes them to the video with that story. So pretty cool. In my plans I would just link, obviously, the text if I put the title in, but when it comes to presenting on the screen or sharing with students and families, I might add an image and hyperlink the image. 

The other way that you can include things by linking them in your slide decks is by embedding them, and so if you go to your insert menu on Google Slides, you can choose to add a video or add a sound, and when you choose from there, you are prompted with a box where you can add either the link to the video that's in your drive or the link to the video that's on YouTube and when you click Insert or Add, that video sort of pops up like a rectangle that looks like the actual video and has a play button on it, and this is called embedding the video. So what this means is when you embed a video, they're gonna watch it within the slide deck. So before, when I just hyperlinked that little book cover, when I click on that it takes me out of Google Drive to YouTube or wherever. The video is kept in a new window and I'm looking at a totally different site. When you embed the video, it stays right there on the slide and it is viewed within your slide deck. The cool thing about this is that you can resize embedded videos so you can make them, if you get really fancy, fit to the size of a little clip art you have that maybe looks like a TV screen or a smart board screen or a computer screen, or you can fit it inside a frame, or you can make it as big as the screen or almost as big as the screen, so that students could watch it right there. The beauty of this is, when using interactive slides with students for their use, you keep them right there in their Google Drive on their slide deck. They're not going out to YouTube where well, let's face it, who knows what could happen? When you keep them right there embedded in your slide, then you know they're not going to stray or wander to other videos because it's just going to show that video right there on your slide. 

For my lessons I use this all the time. For my daily slides I use it as well. I have embedded a little 10-minute timer YouTube video with some music and it's on a little clip art computer screen on a little desk in my little Bitmoji classroom. That is my daily focus slide when we are working on our journals each morning as our bell ringer when we start the day, I just click play and it plays that little 10-minute timer YouTube video right there on the slide. My students can still see everything else that's on there as they're getting settled for the class period. They can read our to-do list, they can see what stories we might read and they can watch the timer all as it counts down all at the same time. So embedding videos is very useful when you are going to have students interacting with YouTube while they're at school or working on an assignment. It goes for any other videos as well. You can embed them just the same way and they will show up. During the pandemic I recorded myself teaching 100 phonics lessons and I saved those videos and can still use them today, and I embed them into a slide that has other phonics resources on it and my students could watch it right there on the slide. So pretty useful to be able to embed videos for your students. Now, what might you want to embed or what might you want to link besides just a YouTube video, because I know we use those a lot as teachers. 

But there are lots of other things that you can link, either within your teaching and student slides or within your own lesson planning slides. I love to link videos, obviously, but also I link a lot to other files within my drive. So if I have another slide deck that's created with, say, all of our anchor charts, I will link an image of the anchor chart on the daily slide deck so that when I click it it pops up in present mode and there's the anchor chart filling the screen and we can discuss it, or my students can access that anchor chart resource for themselves to help them do their work. In my lesson plans. I also link other resources that I have saved in my drive. So on my lesson plan slide deck I will have a link each week to my focus slide deck so that I can toggle between the two really easily. 

And once you get adept at making links and you're thinking about what could you link up, you'll think of lots of other things that you might want to link. 

I'll link teacher pay to teachers pay, teachers resources that I've purchased in my plan so I can go straight to that file and grab what I need. 

I will link to a co-teachers plan or link to the actual unit we've created from my lesson plan so that if I need a more detailed picture or my administrator does, they can go straight from my plan book to my bigger unit plan. 

I also link to places where I might keep student names or class lists or other information, as well as the things that I'm going to assign to my students, so I can find them easily, to update them and make sure when I assign them in Google classroom I have exactly what I'm looking for. So the tip for today is to link text and images on your slide deck and a great trick is to embed those videos, especially when students are going to be using the slide deck to access something, a video on another site. This keeps them focused on the lesson and keeps them in their Google Drive, where it's much safer, and they're less tempted to wander and stray off to other videos or other sites. What other things can you think of to link up? I'm sure there are tons of resources, tons of slide decks, tons of videos, websites and games that you might be able to link for yourself and for your students on your interactive slides. I hope this helps. Thanks for listening. 

Maybe you're feeling really confident and you're ready to start creating your own interactive slides to use in your classroom. Don't worry, I have got you covered. I have three new resources created just for you, and they're all linked in the show notes. The first is a free ebook on how to get the most out of using interactive slides in your classroom. It's the three easiest things I can think of to take your slide deck use to the next level. The next link is going to be to a brand new resource. It's over 100 daily slide background templates that you can use to immediately start adding pictures, text and hyperlinks and get going right away. And the third is a brand new mini course that is set to be released in October of 2023 that teaches you how to create your own interactive slides for use in your classroom or for resale in your own online business. I cannot wait to hear from you and I cannot wait to learn alongside you as we tackle interactive slides together. 

Hey, have you ever thought about making your own interactive slide decks? Maybe the thought has you feeling overwhelmed because you don't understand the technology, or there are just so many options you don't even know where to begin. Well, don't worry, I've got you. I am working on an interactive slides masterclass, a one-time course you can take at your own pace to learn all the tips and tricks I know for creating interactive slide decks that you and your students will love. We'll talk about how to create interactive slides like my calendars and literacy reviews, and also daily focus slides that you can use in your classroom every day of the school year. We'll even talk about how you can come up with your own ideas to create slides that you can sell yourself. I mean, if we're going to do all this work for our own classrooms, why not help other teachers and make a little passive income on the side, right? CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

 

Interactive Slides Backgrounds

 

Welcome to the 21st Century K podcast. I'm Hannah at Teach Elementary School and I help other teachers bridge the gap between traditional elementary and 21st century expectations. We're continuing with our series of episodes on tips and tricks for using interactive slides in your classroom, and today we're going to talk about creating background images that make everything else so much easier. Thanks for joining. Welcome back to our series on tips and tricks for using interactive slides in the classroom. The last couple of weeks we've talked about how to share slides Once you get them finished. We've talked about how to link text and images and embed videos in your slides for student use and family use and for your own planning, and this week we're going to get a little more into the nitty-gritty by talking about creating backgrounds for your interactive slides. 

When you think about creating an interactive slide, you probably have lots of ideas in your head or you've seen lots of other people's creations that are so cool. But when you open that Google Slides app and you're staring at a blank white rectangle, it might be overwhelming to know where to begin. So I always start with the background. Like what do I want the background to look like? Do I want it to look like a classroom. Do I want it to look just like organized and cohesive, or do I want it to have a certain aesthetic, with my color scheme or something that goes with the theme that we're learning? What is my intent with the slide deck? That's what I think about when I start to create a background for a new slide. How much text am I going to have? Where are my images going to go? And then what am I going to use this for? A template or a background that you would create for your lesson planning is obviously going to look a whole lot different than something you would create for a student instructional lesson and then also a daily focus slide that you're going to present. So you kind of have to know your purpose before you start building your background. But once you know that, it's time to think about what will go behind the scenes of your slides. And the reason this is important is because you need to make sure that, first of all, any clip art that you're using, that you have purchased, is locked away and hidden away in the background, so that if someone else were to use your clip art or use your slide deck, they couldn't lift the clip art, meaning if you just pile up a bunch of pictures on a slide and share it with someone. They can copy and paste or right click and save any of the things that you've put on that slide, unless you have them secure in the background. 

So I start by choosing a background color or finding a background picture that I want to use as the whole background of my slide, kind of like my, my slate, or if you're thinking about it in terms of like a bulletin board, the paper that goes on the background. So I pick something for that and then I begin to build in the things that I want my students and myself to be able to see but not manipulate. So if it's a Bitmoji classroom that I'm going to use for my daily slide deck, I might add in some images of bookshelves or a computer or a smart board screen or even an inspirational poster or a flag or a school logo. I can add just about anything that I want, as long as I realize what I'm adding will not be part of the manipulation. I can't exactly link any of the things in the background and my students will not be able to tamper with or move any of these things when I'm making a background slide for a lesson plan template. I might create white boxes for where I want things to go so that I can organize my thoughts or what I'm typing. I might add in my name or the subject titles for each column that I'm creating things that aren't going to change over the course of the year. I'll definitely add some kind of cute inspirational clip art and I'll choose a background color, maybe for the whole year or maybe just for each month that will go behind all of those boxes and all of those words that I'm adding on top. 

Now the tip here is to create backgrounds that you can add to another slide deck where you're going to put all the things that need to be manipulated on top, and the trick is saving those slides to insert them in your new slide deck as a background. So there's a couple of ways to do this. I love, love, love PowerPoint, so I create all of my backgrounds offline using PowerPoint on my laptop, because I'm still old school and that's what I love. You could do the same thing in Google Slides, but I prefer PowerPoint. 

If you create them offline in PowerPoint, there's a way to go in and save your slide, your PowerPoint slide, as a JPEG or a PNG image file. So you go to file save and then choose the drop down menu Instead of saving it as a PowerPoint. Go down and choose JPEG. It will ask you if you want to just save the slide you're working on or the entire slide deck. It will create a folder and it will save each of those slides as an image. Once you do that, then you can go on over to Google Slides, open up a slide deck right click or two finger click or insert background whatever your method for getting there is and upload the image from your computer and it will pop it right in the background. So then all of those things are secure. You can be sure that nobody's going to lift the clip art, nobody's going to move anything around or change anything if they get a hold of your slide deck and it is absolutely stuck there in the background. Nothing you do on top is going to change how the background looks. 

Now, google Slides, I think, can be saved this way, but it's a little trickier. So I bypass all of that, and when I create a background on a Google slide deck that I want to save as an image, I just either screenshot and crop down the entire computer screen or I use the snip tool and just snip that screen and save it as its own image, and then I upload it into a new slide deck, the same way I would a JPEG or a PNG that I saved from PowerPoint. Once you do that, then you start adding all those links, all that text, all those images, maybe even something that you might change weekly, like your little bitmoji or the images of covers of books that you're going to link. You can put those right on your little shelf that's in the background. It not only makes it easier to use and less likely that anyone can make changes, but it also makes your slide decks load a lot faster. So the trick is that once all of that heavy graphic is in the background, you don't have to wait for each individual thing to load when you open your slide deck. If you've ever used a slide deck from someone who hasn't secured their background, you'll know that when you pop that slide open, it sometimes takes a while for every little image and every little piece to pop up. And when you get carried away layering stuff like I do, who knows how many things might be in the background. 

This week's tip is create your own personalized backgrounds, save them as images and then pop them into the background of your slide deck so that you can add all the interactive parts and pieces, all the linkable texts and images on top, so that you've secured your clip art, nobody's going to make changes and your slides will load a whole lot faster. Hope this helps. Thanks for listening. Still feeling stuck on creating your own backgrounds? I get it. That white rectangle can be really overwhelming when you sit down to create something new from scratch. That's why I've created a new resource with over 100 pre-designed, coordinated background images that you can copy and paste right into your own slide decks and then add on top to your heart's content. You can find this resource by clicking the link in the show notes. Maybe you're ready to make your own, but you need a little more guidance. I've got you covered too. CLICK HERE to learn more about 21st Century K's Interactive Slides Masterclass!

Sharing Interactive Slides

 

Welcome to the 21st Century K podcast. I'm Hannah, I teach elementary school and I help other teachers bridge the gap between traditional elementary and 21st century expectations. In this episode, we're going to kick off a series of episodes with tips and tricks on how to best use interactive slides in your classroom. Hopefully, these will be things you can take back and put into practice immediately, starting with today's tip on how to share slide decks with co-teachers and families. Thanks for joining. In last week's episode, I talked all about how I use daily focus sides to keep my lessons organized and to share with co-workers, administrators and families. So for the first trick and tip to using interactive slides in your classroom, I want to talk about how I share slide decks that I've created with others, and there's actually several different options for sharing that you may or may not have known about or maybe forgot, and this will be a great reminder. The first way to share a slide deck or any other Google file is to click the share button within the file and send it to people within your organization by adding their email address. So when you do this, you have two options. There's a little drop down menu beside each email address and you can select viewer or editor. When you select editor, that gives the person who follows your link rights to make any changes within your document. So if you're sharing daily focus slides with a paraprofessional or a special education co-teacher who needs to go in and make changes, then that is the perfect link to give them. It's a perfect way to share. If you are going to collaborate on creating and editing the slides, you might also do that with another teammate who's teaching the same content or what have you. These people also may benefit from a copy link and you can choose that on the share menu as well, so that it forces them to make their own copy of your file. So this would take away the opportunity to collaborate within the same document, but it would give them their own so that if they personalize it or make changes to use in their classroom, they can do so freely without making changes to your original. Now, when you click the share button, you can also choose viewer from the drop down menu after you add the email addresses of people within your organization. 

The viewer link is great for administrators or other teachers who are just going to be looking at what you have or showing it to students reading it for their own knowledge or just checking in on whatever it is that you're teaching. This is the link that I use for substitute teachers. It's been really great for me to be able to leave that link or link it in a digital lesson plan that I share so that my substitute can pull up my daily focus slide and have it on the board when students come in. This really helps the subs lesson stay on track and it mimics what we would be doing if I was there. So it takes out a lot of those questions from the students like what are we going to be doing, or we should have been doing this, or Ms Stark says that we do it. This way, you can actively communicate through that daily focus slide and it really helps a subs day on track and it gives your students some comfort and stability that the day is going to go, maybe hopefully semi normal. So those are the share options within the Google slide document. 

Now I don't use either one of those share links with my families, and that's where today's tip and trick really comes into play. In my daily emails I include a link to my weekly focus slide deck. I have found that many families enjoy just reading up on what it is that we're learning. Some families may even be so inclined to click some of the resource links or help their child with some of the content, ask them about it, have a conversation about how they're doing, or access the resources when their child is absent from school, so that they don't get too far behind. It is just a really great and easy way to share with families every single week exactly what you're doing and using in the classroom, and I am all about transparency when it comes to teaching and when it comes to working with families and everybody getting on the same page and being on the same team for my students. 

I found while I was teaching kindergarten online that sharing that link from within the document was a little bit cumbersome for families. Even when I send the viewer link, when they open the slide deck, it still looks like it's in the Google Slides interface. So all the toolbars are still there, even if they are not available for use. All of the thumbnails are down the left side of the screen and sometimes the print is really tiny because there's all that dead space around where you've created your slides and it can just be ugly, for lack of a better word, and if something is not easy to use or pleasant to the eye, most people won't use it. 

So I started thinking about how I might be able to share my slide decks in a way that it looks more like a website, and that's when I started sending my daily slide deck link as a present mode slide deck. So you may or may not know that when you open your slide deck in the address bar it's this really long Google address for accessing your slide deck or your file. If you go all the way to the end and delete the text after the last slash you'll say it usually says like edit with some numbers and some coding. If you will delete all of that away and replace it with the word present P-R-E-S-E-N-T, and then highlight and copy that entire address from the address bar and use that as the link that you send to families, when they click it it will automatically open your slideshow in present mode and you can't get out of present mode from there. So what that does is it gives families the slide deck with none of the extra stuff around the edge. There are no toolbar showing, there are no thumbnails down the side, there's no dead space around the slides themselves. It just pops up the slide and everything that you've hyperlinked is accessible and they can click through if you have multiple slides and find what they need. They can also access embedded videos within the slide or even embedded sound bites, if you ever use any of those. It is pretty cool. 

If I do say so myself, when families click on this link it pulls it up and it looks kind of like a webpage. Now, if you're using interactive slides with movable parts that you want students to manipulate and change, this is not the best link to send, because obviously, in slideshow mode you cannot manipulate any of the pieces. You have to be in edit mode for that, unless you have a new extension that I can't wait to share about in the next couple of weeks that allows you to move things in slideshow mode. It's game changing. Anyway, I digress when it comes to sharing the present mode link with families. It just makes it so much easier. 

Now, if you want to take this trip, tip, tip and trick to the next level, then you could screenshot your slide and put a little image in your email and hyperlink the image with your present mode link so that when families open their email, there's the image. I think people are far more inclined to click an image than they are to click text. So when the image is there and you hyperlink the image and they click on it, it will pull up your slide show in present mode where they can access the resources and click through if they need to. If you are feeling like you can really take this to the next level, then you are gonna love this trick. This is the magical part to me. It's what makes my job easier. 

So what I have done is created one slide deck that I have named my Master Weekly Slide Deck and I have it saved in a folder on my computer In my Google Drive. For that particular slide deck, I got the present mode link. By going to the end, deleting the last part and replacing it with the word present, I copy that present mode link and created a shortcut bitly URL. So if you take that entire address, go to bitlycom and put your entire present mode address for your Master Slide Deck and on the Bitly site it creates a shortcut link. So I have a shortcut link that's bitly forward slash, stark, daily slides 2023,. Let's say, I create that shortcut link and then that's the link that I use for my emails and for any other place that I'm sharing my daily slides in present mode with my families, and this is where I save so much time and energy. 

I have a folder with a slide deck for each week of the school year. Every week I pull that slide deck up and make adjustments for the new year and then I copy and paste those slides into my Master Weekly Slide Deck. That means that when anyone clicks to access that Master Weekly Slide Deck, it will automatically have the updated slides for the current week. Oh, this means I do not have to remember to go back and link every individual weekly slide deck in my emails. I just use the same link every single time. It is the same link that I can leave for a sub if they just need to access it in present mode. It's the same link that I can send on a whim to a family if a student is maybe sick or absent for a long period of time. And it's the link that I put in my emails every single day. So I do not have to remember to change out my links, because every single week I just change out the slides. I have that same slide deck bookmarked at the top of my Chrome homepage so that when I get to school I click daily slides and up pops whatever I need for the week, right there before my eyes. I use the same shortcut link for families and they're able to click and access my daily slides at any given time. It has been a total game changer and it's been totally helpful for many of my families. I hope that it helps you too. 

So let's recap. The first tip and trick that we have learned for using Interactive Slides in the classroom is to share them. You can use the share links and the copy links within the Google Slides program to share with coworkers, co-teachers, teammates, administrators, substitute teachers and anyone else who may be helping in your classroom. But you can use that special present mode link to send to families so that they can click and access your slide decks from their phone, from their tablets, from work or from their home computer. Simply go to the end of the address bar and delete all of the text after the last slash and replace them with the word present P-R-E-S-E-N-T. Then grab that entire address and use that for your families. Or, if you're really feeling fancy, grab that entire address for your master slide deck, create a shortcut link and send the same shortcut link to your families, day after day, week after week, while you just change out the slides in the background to prep for each new week of school. I hope this helps and that you are ready to tackle your daily focus slides this week. 

Thanks for listening. Maybe you're feeling really confident and you're ready to start creating your own interactive slides to use in your classroom. Don't worry, I have got you covered. I have three new resources created just for you, and they're all linked in the show notes. The first is a free ebook on how to get the most out of using interactive slides in your classroom. It's the three easiest things I can think of to take your slide deck use to the next level. The next link is going to be to a brand new resource. It's over 100 daily slide background templates that you can use to immediately start adding pictures, text and hyperlinks and get going right away. And the third is a brand new mini course that is set to be released in October of 2023 that teaches you how to create your own interactive slides for use in your classroom or for resale in your own online business. I cannot wait to hear from you and I cannot wait to learn alongside you as we tackle interactive slides together. 

Hey, have you ever thought about making your own interactive slide decks? Maybe the thought has you feeling overwhelmed because you don't understand the technology, or there are just so many options you don't even know where to begin. Well, don't worry, I've got you. I am working on an interactive slides masterclass, a one-time course you can take at your own pace to learn all the tips and tricks I know for creating interactive slide decks that you and your students will love. We'll talk about how to create interactive slides like my calendars and literacy reviews, and also daily focus slides that you can use in your classroom every day of the school year. We'll even talk about how you can come up with your own ideas to create slides that you can sell yourself. I mean, if we're going to do all this work for our own classrooms, why not help other teachers and make a little passive income on the side, right? CLICK HERE to learn more about 21st Century K's Interactive Slides Masterclass!