1: Creating a Google Slides Presentation

Overview

With Google Slides you can create effective and professional-looking presentations complete with handouts, engaging training sessions, memorable slideshows, and stunning photo albums. With Slides, it is quick and easy to create attention-grabbing presentations that combine text, graphics, audio, and video. You can make your presentations even more professional by adding charts, tables, diagrams, animations, special effects, and more.

In this section, you will learn

• • about features in Slides

  • how to build slides and enter text

  • how to edit your presentation by adding and deleting text and slides

  • how to use different views to arrange your slides

  • how to save your presentation to a folder

Planning/Preparing a Presentation

Before you begin creating your digital presentation, it is important to spend some time planning and preparing. Doing so will keep you focused on your objective as you build your presentation. The following are steps you should take whenever you plan to give a presentation for school, work, or personal reasons.

Step 1: Determine the purpose of your presentation.

Your presentation might be intended to

• • train, educate, or inform your audience

  • report findings from research

  • persuade your audience to take action

Step 2: Determine what you want your audience to learn from your presentation.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• • What is the point of my presentation?

  • What message do I want my audience to remember?

  • Who is my audience?

Your audience might be any of the following or someone else entirely:

• • students

  • employees

  • peers

  • customers

  • teacher

  • boss

Understanding your audience will help set the tone and the feel of your presentation. Will your presentation be formal or informal, exciting or informative, professional or humorous? Knowing your audience will determine how you structure your presentation, because how you communicate with your peers is different than how you communicate with your boss.

Ask yourself the following questions about your audience:

• • What do they already know about the topic?

  • What is their attitude or experience on the topic?

  • What is the age range of my audience?

  • What are they expecting from my presentation?

  • What will keep them interested in my presentation?

When you take time to consider these questions, you will be able to customize your presentation to keep your audience engaged.

Step 3: Set a timeline and estimate how long it will take you to do each of the following. Then you’ll be ready to start completing each bullet. Before you know it, you’ll have a presentation.

• 1. Research and gather information.

     • Use credible sources.

     • Properly cite ideas, quotations, facts, and surveys.

     • Develop and conduct your own surveys, interviews, questionnaires, or experiments.

  2. Create your presentation.

     • Enter and format information onto slides.

       • Develop a strong opening to introduce your topic.

       • Build slides to support your ideas.

       • Limit the amount of text per slide; be clear and to the point.

       • Keep your audience’s interest level and attention span in mind.

       • Wrap up your presentation with a closing slide that reinforces your message.

  3. Enhance your presentation.

     • Add graphics, charts, and multimedia.

     • Include links, effects, and animation.

  4. Collaborate and present the presentation.

     • Review your presentation, checking for errors and omissions.

     • Request a constructive review of your presentation.

     • Review the flow of ideas and organize slides for delivery.

     • Rehearse timings for an auto-run presentation that isn’t too fast or too slow.

     • Prepare speaker and presentation handouts.

     • Prepare to present and publish the presentation, including practising using presentation equipment on location, if possible.

How do I make my presentation professional?

Follow these tips for creating a professional slide show:

• • Format text consistently on each slide by limiting the number of fonts, sizes, and styles.

  • Apply coordinated and consistent colour and formatting schemes to text and background, and choose fonts (and size), colour, and background colours that are easy for your audience to read.

  • Insert graphics, tables, charts, or video to support or clarify your message.

  • Use animations to highlight information on slides.

  • Apply transitions between slides.

  • Use special effects sparingly, thoughtfully, and consistently for the greatest impact—too many or random effects can be distracting.

Google Slides 101

Each section has you work on a Slides presentation. From each section, you will be instructed to watch demonstrations. Review some basic information on Slides now, as needed.

• • Google Slides Cheat Sheet

  • Slides Help

Instructions

For this activity you will use the information you gathered and composed for your Career Connections Report from INF1030 Word Processing 1. You will communicate the findings of your investigation by creating a Slides presentation that you will use to practise the skills you learn throughout the course.

Here is a finished presentation (i.e. completed all 5 sections) from last year so you see what you're working towards:

Example 1

There are two parts to this first activity:

Part 1—Career Connections Investigation

Locate your Career Connections Report in Drive. You will copy and paste text from your document into the text placeholders on the slides that you will create in Part 2 of this activity. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you missed any part or had significant deficiencies in your report, you will need to address these deficiencies so that the content is comprehensive for your slide presentation. Refer to the feedback on your INF1030 Final Project.

Part 2—Creating a Basic Presentation

Once you have information from your career connections investigation, you will create a basic presentation that you will modify and enhance as you work through the other sections. Your presentation at this point should be basic with no formatting or enhancements.

If you’re not sure how to complete a certain step, be sure to watch the “Google Slides Introduction” videos in youtube to refresh yourself on how to do this in Slides.

Step 1: Open Slides and create a Blank Presentation (for now, use the black on white theme).

Step 2: Add slides to your presentation that have the following information on them:

• • title slide called Career Connections

  • outline slide to provide an overview of the presentation (will serve as a kind of table of contents)

  • personal inventory slide to summarize your results from the self-assessment tools on the ALIS website (if this was marked as insufficient, you will need to provide more/better information)

  • three occupational profiles slides to profile three careers that interest you

  • connections slide to make connections from your ALIS self-assessment results to your career choices; this slide will address why you are interested in or suited to these careers

  • reflections slide to communicate what you see as the positive and negative aspects of the job

  • reference slide to cite your source(s)

  • closing slide to tie up your presentation

Step 3: Review the information on creating effective presentations here. At minimum, view the video. Apply these tips as you work through the course.

Step 4: Save the presentation as “Career Connections - Firstname Lastname” in your Practice folder. You do not need to submit anything yet.