Part of the reason social media has taken off so much are the connections. Seeing other people’s reaction to what you’ve shared. Learning from others.

We can get the same attraction when we do collaborative learning in the classroom.

Google Slides makes this possible. Really easy and quick, too.

By creating a slide presentation and sharing it with students, it creates a few really cool features:

• A shared learning environment where everyone is doing their work together
• A little piece of digital real estate for every student
• An easy way to talk about what they’re creating and learning

In this tutorial video, I’ll show you step-by-step how to get started with shared Google Slides and some of the great things you can do with it:

• Collaborative writing prompts (kind of like a blog)
• Sharing research findings with the class
• Creating something big together a little at a time

… and more!

1:30 — Step 1: Create a new slide presentation

2:20 — Step 2: Set the layout the way you want

2:35 — Step 3: Create slides for every student in the class

3:10 — Step 4: Share the presentation with students

4:00 — Ways to share the presentation with students

6:10 — Step 5: Have students get to work on their assignment

8:55 — Activity idea: Simple question/prompt

9:10 — Activity idea: Virtual manipulatives

10:15 — More ideas: Ads, billboards, graphic organizers and more

11:00 — Step 6: Add comments for student collaboration

13:15 — Tips for great student comments

16:30 — How to make sure every student in class gets comments

18:10 — Ninja trick 1: Use add-ons for more Slides functionality

21:00 — Ninja trick 2: Set background to make items un-moveable

24:30 — Ninja trick 3: Copy/paste groups of slides repeatedly

25:40 — Ninja trick 4: Stash useful images around the slide