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Three Ways to Use Interactive Slide Decks in Your Classroom

 When we are working online with students in a digital or hybrid setting, we want to make sure that lessons are as engaging as possible to ensure that students are paying attention and learning.  A great way to do this is by creating interactive slide decks for students to work with.  We can make these kinds of presentations by linking different slides together so that students can interact with the presentation while they work through it.  If you want to know more about linking images, slides, and other media in a slide deck, check out the post Two Ways to Have Interactive Images in Your Lessons. 

1. Formative Assessments and Practice Problems

Using the branching method, we can create slides that link to each other based on a student's response to a question.  If we provide students with a multiple choice answer, we can set up a link that takes them to a new slide for their specific answer.  This is great for practice and formative assessments because we can give students immediate feedback based on their answer.  If they got the question correct, we can let them know and then move them forward to the next question.  If they did not get the question correct, we can guide them on where they may have been wrong, and send them back to the original question to try again.  We can do this for as many questions as needed and know students are practicing while getting immediate feedback.  This type of assessment is demonstrated in the photos below.  This type of assessment can also be built in Google Forms.  To learn how to use that tool, check out the post Using Google Forms to Design "Choose Your Own Adventure" Lessons.

2. Resource Pages

When we are using lots of different tech tools and resources in the classroom, we want to create a landing page for students and parents so they can easily find the links needed.  We can use interactive slides to share all of those links.  We can either create icons or images for each link provided and have it link out to the needed site or tool.  This ensures that students and parents always know where to look for tools.  It is also easier to post the slides to Google Classroom instead of having a lot of links under your Resources topic.  If you are a multi-subject teacher, you could use different slides in the slide deck to organize the links by subject, making them easier to find.

There are a lot of different versions of these "resource page" slides out there.  One of the most common seen is the Bitmoji classroom that gained popularity at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year.  Teachers were able to create cartoon versions of their classrooms and include links for books, tools, and other sites students would need to access during the year.  This can also be seeing with "class apps."  These are resource page slide decks that are restricted to presentation mode and set up to look like the app library on an iPhone.  Students can then click on the "app" they want, and the link will take them to the needed resource.

3. Classroom Resources

During my student teaching, we were working in a fully virtual learning environment.  This made it hard to use resources like word walls with the students because they could not always see the physical wall in the classroom.  I was able to create an interactive slide deck that acted as the word wall.  All of the words appeared on the first slide and linked out to a page with a definition and visual.  This was so helpful for students who needed extra support with the vocabulary.  Using slide decks to create interactive, virtual word walls is a great way to ensure students are still being supported when they are at home or completing homework.  Just like the word wall is placed on a physical wall in the classroom, virtual word walls can be added to the chapter section in Google Classroom so students can refer to them whenever they need support.
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