While you may already know the basics of Google Slides, there are many things you can do to make your presentation slides richer and easier to navigate. If you are new to Slides and want to learn the basics, visit our Getting Started with Slides article.
Design Your Presentations for Reading
Many of your students will interact with your presentations primarily via a screen. Eye-tracking studies have shown that people read differently on screens and are less able to concentrate and retain what they’ve read. Fortunately, there are a number of simple techniques to improve readability of your Slides presentations and other documents designed to be viewed on a screen.
Add Images, Audio, and Video Files
Google Slides allows you to add music and audio to your presentations. This can be a great way to spice up your content. If you don’t have your own recordings, many (especially historical items) are available in the public domain.
Here are simple written instructions for adding images, audio, and video to a Slides presentation. Important: Don’t forget to add captioning to your audio. You can do this automatically in Slides.
You can do this yourself – and/or you can have your students create an audio presentation! One interesting genre that you can ask your students to work in is Ted-Ed talks.
Link To a Specific Paragraph in a Google Doc or a Specific Cell in a Google Sheet
You can link from a Slide straight to a specific paragraph in a Google Doc or to a specific cell on a Google Sheet. This can function like a paper in-class handout – it can point students to a particular passage or calculation you want them to analyze together.
First, make sure that your Google Doc or Google Sheet is accessible to your students (that is, either make it public or open for all Champlain addresses, or share it with students individually if you haven’t already).
To insert a link to a specific part of a Google Doc, create a bookmark in your Google Doc. Do this by highlighting the paragraph you want to link to. Click “Insert” and then “Bookmark.” You’ll then see a little box with two options: “link” and “remove”. Click “link” to copy the bookmark, and then insert the link into your Google Slide as you would insert any link.
To insert a link to a specific box on a Google Sheet, highlight the cell to which you want to link, and then right-click and choose “Get link to this cell.” When you do this, the link will automatically be copied to your clipboard and you can simply paste it into your Google Slide as you would any other link.
Link to Another Slide in a Presentation
In addition to linking to web pages, you can link between slides in your presentation. This can be very helpful in creating a guided lesson.
To do so, simply highlight the text you want to use as your link, then right click and choose “Link,” and then, instead of typing or pasting a URL into the Link box, click “Slides from this Presentation” and choose the slide you want.
This can be helpful for creating a table of contents for a longer presentation (you can even have just one slide presentation that you use for lecturing the whole semester long if you think it would be easier for students to find and reference).
Further Techniques
Explore our article on creative uses of Google Slides for non-traditional ways you can leverage Slides in your class.
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