Some of my Favorites – Grackle Slides & Docs
This week is school vacation week here in Maine. I usually take this week off to go ice fishing on Moosehead Lake. Unfortunately, that’s not happening this year. Instead I’ll be “staycationing” and working on some projects around home. While on my staycation I’ll be sharing some of my personal favorite tools. Grackle Slides is […]
How to Check the Accessibility of Your Google Slides
Yesterday afternoon I saw someone on Twitter ask if there is a way to evaluate the accessibility of a slide presentation. My answer was to try Grackle Slides. Grackle Slides is a Google Slides add-on that will evaluate the accessibility of your presentation and give you suggestions on how to improve the accessibility of your […]
ScriptSlide – A Google Slides Add-on for Pacing Presentations
ScriptSlide is an interesting Google Slides add-on that takes the speaker notes in your Google Slides and displays them in a teleprompter-like screen that you can control with your phone. That might sound complicated, but it’s not. Here’s how ScriptSlide works. First, write your presentation with speaker notes as you normally would. Second, enable the […]
Two Neat Polling Tools That I Recently Recommended
I get a lot of questions from readers. I try to answer all of them. Those that I think have a broad appeal I turn into blog posts and or include in my podcast. Earlier this week I received a question from a reader who was looking for suggestions for polling tools that her students […]
A New Version of Easy Accents for Google Docs
Easy Accents is a Google Docs and Google Slides add-on that I’ve been using and recommending for years. This morning I went to use the add-on in Google Docs and noticed that there was a little message informing users to install a new version of Easy Accents. The new version works the same way as […]
My Updated Five Favorite Google Slides Add-ons
Earlier this year I published a rundown of my five favorite Google Slides add-ons. Since then a couple of those add-ons have gone the way of the 5.25″ floppy disk. Fortunately, I’ve recently discovered a couple of new Google Slides add-ons that I really like. Here’s the updated list of my five favorite Google Slides […]
Slides Randomizer – A Neat Google Slides Add-on
Slides Randomizer is a Google Slides add-on that will randomly shuffle a set of Google Slides. It’s easy to use the Slides Randomizer add-on. Once you’ve installed the add-on simply select Slides Randomizer from the add-ons drop-down menu while viewing your slides then click on “randomize presentation.” Right before the slides shuffle you’ll be asked […]
How to Create and Run Polls in Google Slides
Slido is a polling service that recently released a free Google Slides add-on and companion Chrome extension. The combination of the two tools makes it easy for anyone who uses Google Slides to quickly create and launch polls directly within the Google Slides editor. The thing that I like about Slido is that you can […]
Slido – Create and Run Polls Within Your Google Slides
Slido is a polling tool that has recently launched a Google Slides add-on and a corresponding Chrome extension. With Slido installed you can create polls directly in the Google Slides editor. The poll will appear as a slide in your presentation. The poll slide includes your question and the directions for your audience to respond […]
Unsplash for Education – Free Photos for Your Lessons
Unsplash is one of my go-to recommendations for finding public domain pictures for classroom projects. Thanks to Rushton Hurley’s latest Next Vista for Education newsletter I just learned that Unsplash now has an Unsplash for Education section. Unsplash for Education is comprised of ten curated collections of images for teachers and students to use in their […]
How to Use the Photo Slideshow Add-on for Google Slides
Last week I published 5 Ways to Quickly Create Audio Slideshows for End-of-Year Events. In that post I mentioned using the Google Slides add-on called Photo Slideshow. Over the last week I’ve answered a handful of questions from people who ran into a little difficulty using that add-on. I made the following video to show […]
5 Favorite Google Slides Add-ons
Last week I shared my favorite Google Forms add-ons. Yesterday, I shared my favorite Google Docs add-ons. So today I’m sharing my favorite Google Slides add-ons. Unsplash Unsplash Photos Google Slides add-on gives you instant access to Unsplash’s collection of free, royalty-free photographs. In the following video I demonstrate how to add the Add-on to […]
An Easy Way to Create a GIF from Google Slides
A simple animated GIF can be useful for things like showing how a simple system works, illustrating the steps to solving a math problem, or showing a sequence of before and after pictures. A few months ago I shared three easy ways to create animated GIFs. This morning I discovered another easy way to create […]
Use These Two Google Slides Add-ons to Create Audio Slideshows
It’s that time of year when I get a lot of requests for recommendations on tools for making audio slideshows. I get these requests because people want to make slideshows to showcase some of the highlights of the year in their schools. One relatively quick and easy way to make an audio slideshow in Google […]
Easy Accents for Google Slides
For the last couple of years I have recommended the Easy Accents Add-on for Google Docs. It’s a free Add-on that gives you access to a virtual keyboard to use to write non-English characters in your Google Documents. Recently, the Easy Accents Add-on became available in a version for Google Slides. Easy Accents for Google […]
Sourcera for Google Slides – Historical Images to Use In Your Slides
Sourcera is an Add-on for Google Slides that lets you search for historical images and insert them directly into your slides. Sourcera pulls images from eleven sources including Flickr’s Commons, the British Library, and the Digital Public Library of America. To find an image through Sourcera you need to highlight a word on a slide […]
5 Add-ons I’m Utilizing More Often in 2018
Add-ons can provide a lot of additional functionality to Google Forms, Sheets, Slides, and Docs. In some cases using the right Add-on can save you a lot of time on completing routine tasks. Other times they make Forms, Sheets, Slides, and Docs do things that they could not otherwise do for you. Here are five […]
This Add-on Makes It Easy to Create Photo Slideshows
Photo Slideshow is a free Add-on that makes it quick and easy to import an entire Google Photos or Google Drive folder into Google Slides. Once you have installed the Add-on just select either Google Photos or Google Drive and then choose the folder of images that you want to have displayed in a slideshow. […]
Free Music to Use In Google Slides Presentations
Earlier this week I published directions for how to add music to your Google Slides presentations. In those directions I mentioned that in order to add music to your presentation you first need to store it in your Google Drive account. If you find yourself or your students in need of some free music to […]
Add Audio to Google Slides With This Add-on
One of the things that almost every new Google Slides user wants to know the answer to is, “how can I add music to my presentation?” Last year I shared two methods for doing that. And for 2018 there is a third method that I am recommending. That method is to use the Audio Player […]
5 Good Alternatives to Google Image Search
Google Images tends to be the default image search tool of students and adults who haven’t been introduced to better options. Google Images is convenient, but it’s not the best place for students to find images that are in the public domain or images that have been labeled with a Creative Commons license. Here are […]
25 G Suite Add-ons & Chrome Extensions for Teachers & Students
G Suite for Education on its own provides a powerful set of tools for your classroom. G Suite gets event better when you start to use the Add-ons available for Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms. On a similar note, Google’s Chrome browser becomes a better tool when you start to add some extensions to it. […]
How to Find Free Photos Within Google Slides
Google Slides now has Add-ons just like Docs, Sheets, and Forms. The selection of Google Slides Add-ons is fairly limited at this point, but there are some good ones for teachers and students within that small collection. One of those is the Unsplash Photos Add-on. This Add-on gives you instant access to Unsplash’s collection of […]