Google has renamed, improved and extended its Google
Presentations cloud software. Over the past year it has thus turned from a
rather mediocre product into a great teaching and learning tool. Whereas a year
ago I turned to Google presentation only for experiments, it has become my tool
of choice when it comes to using presentation slides in the classroom. Among
the improvements are:
- Character-by-character collaboration: See updates in real-time as you edit presentations with other people.
- Drawing on canvas: Draw organizational charts, flowcharts, design diagrams and much more right within Google Slides.
- Transitions: Enhance your presentation with new ways to transition between slides.
- Shape linking: Turn shapes within your presentation into hyperlinks to other slides, presentations, or external webpages.
- Better animations: added new themes to make it easy to create show-stopping presentations.
- Commenting: Collaborate with other people by adding comments to shapes, text or slides.
Google Slides now has great collaboration features (real
time editing, commenting, different sharing options) as well as great
integration with other Google products (from inserting media from Drive, Picasa
and YouTube to publishing on Google+). Best of all is
the implementation of the
research tool known from Google Documents, which makes inserting pictures,
links, quotes and book reference really quick and easy. - quick and easy classroom presentations (without the option to forget a flash drive)
- online publishing/embedding on Moodle, Social Media group or class blog
- substitute for an electronic whiteboard with subsequent sharing
- collaborative creation of flashcards (for use on mobile devices)
- mind mapping tool
- conduct webinars in conjunctions with Google Hangouts
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