Presentation Tools
There are so many ways to get a point across nowadays, and one of the best ways to provide visual accompaniment to your lessons. Use these presentation tips and tricks to elevate your classroom to a new level!
Google Slides
Google Slides is the power of the powerpoint in the internet era. Presentations can be themed, shared, uploaded, put on a timer, animated, set to play video, and SO MUCH MORE! Google Slides also works in conjunction with Google Drive and presentations can be very easily organized, uploaded to schoology, shared with students, and accessed anywhere! Here are some useful tips I've come across for using Google Slides the most effectively.
THEMES
Spice up your presentation with an exciting theme! Many themes come as preset options in Google Slides itself, but if you exhaust those, Slides Carnival is an excellent website filled with exciting (and completely free!) Google Slides templates. You could also create your own theme for a presentation, just don't use Comic Sans. Trust me.
ANIMATION
Want your statistics to appear on the slide as you're talking about them? Want a shape to spin? Want a little car to drive across the bottom of the slide? Use animation! Simply click on the tab at the top of the page called "Transition" and add transitions between slides and click on an object in your slide to animate it! This feature is helpful for keeping kids engaged and layering multiple elements on a page, but be careful. Excessive animation may distract from the actual content of the slides!
NOTABILITY
Using Google Slides in tandem with Notability is a very effective way for students to take notes on a presentation. Simply share the presentation with your students and have them import it into Notability as a pdf! From there, they can make written or text notes on the presentation, record the lecture to listen to later (tap the microphone icon in the top right to turn on the microphone, and write down the timestamp that a slide begins on for more effective studying), or even add their own images, such as a picture of the whiteboard or of a problem on paper. These notes can also be uploaded to Drive and shared with other students, so if a student is absent they don't have to miss lecture notes!
For some students, especially those sitting in the back of the classroom, it can be difficult to get a good view of the projector. Sharing your presentations with students via a link on Schoology or through Google Drive can help solve this problem, and allows them to access warm-ups, agendas, materials, videos, and anything else that can be done with Google Drive, from any device. I've found it especially helpful to upload weekly agendas, so students can keep track of their homework and assignments for each week, as well as sharing any presentation that involves heavy reading to the students so they can see it better, and even put it into notability to annotate it or take notes!
A SECOND SCREEN
Prezi is useful for presentations that would benefit from an interactive space. Prezi does not use individual slides, instead they have one large workspace and move from snapshot to snapshot of the area, moving every direction, zooming, and twisting. This sort of style is not for everyone, and may cause some motion sickness, but would be very effective in a presentation about anatomy, historic places on a map, a tour of the solar system, a look into a cell, or movement across a chart. For an example of what prezi looks like, here's one I made about airserver. (Who knows, you might even learn something new!)