On our SOLs, TEIs are often the biggest struggle for our students. Google Slides can offer a great avenue for pushing out practice on these types of questions. With the ability to insert shapes, text boxes, lines, etc. and the ease of moving them about the slide, it becomes easy to set up interactive TEIs for student practice.

One of the best ways to utilize Google Slides for TEI practice is with creating a graph with which students must interact (demonstrated in the video below), which can also be used outside of test prep.

It’s also easy to create an informal, whole group TEI assessment using the same tools mentioned above.

The video below shows some examples of TEI practice on Google slides and how to create each type (interactive vs. whole group).

There are many advantages to HyperDocs, or documents that contain hyperlinks to all of the material and products a student might need. Typically, these are created in Google Docs, but I have found that Google Slides can work just as well. If you want a student to be completely self-sufficient, either works, but if you want to incorporate some self-checking/differentiating, Slides provides the opportunity to link to another slide in the presentation, allowing for remediation or acceleration through the content.

This linking to another slide also allows for creating things like Jeopardy review games, Create Your Own Adventure stories, or “personality quizzes.”

The video below shows some examples of how Google Slides can become interactive learning documents and demonstrates how to get started on making your own.

There is no denying that social media plays a HUGE role in our students’ lives. We know utilizing it in the classroom can make for some pretty engaging activities. But it can sometimes be intimidating, unsafe, or impossible to access the real thing. Taking advantage of the editing freedom in Google Slides, you can create fake social media templates that students then edit to fit a book character, historical figure, cell part… you name it!

Below are some samples.

Fake Twitter Template

Fake Instagram Template

This video goes over the fake Twitter and Instagram templates I’ve already created for some ideas on how to create your own!

No matter the subject, there is vocabulary. And in most subjects, there is also writing. By utilizing Google Slides, you can expand your options in both of these realms.

For vocabulary, it is often of the utmost importance that our students be able to make connections with the word. Creating a vocabulary vault with Google Slides, whether it be ongoing or each week, allows students to have their vocabulary at their fingertips and be easy to interact with.

When writing, it is often easy to prompt students' creativity or critical thinking with videos and images. Google Slides allows you to easily insert both of these for independent work time. It’s also possible to include tutorial videos of yourself or someone else walking through the writing process (or any process for that matter) and breaking down a writing assignment into smaller chunks.

The video below demonstrates how to get started creating each of these three options, but the possibilities are essentially endless once you get the hang of it.