Tag: #googleslides

6 Tips to Use Google Slides for eLearning

There is no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed everyone’s lives. Nowadays, most things are done remotely – including education. Thanks to eLearning, instructors can continue teaching – without the fear of causing an outbreak. 

While you can use many tools for eLearning, Google Slides prove to be very popular. Although it’s very easy to use, it is not without hurdles. So if you want to master this helpful platform, here are six tips that should help you out. 

1. Keep it on the Cloud

Think about this: you’ve spent countless hours making a perfect presentation. Just when you’re on your last slide, the power turns off. Now you’ve lost a majority of the slides.

As this is every instructor’s worst nightmare, the best way to avoid this is to save everything in the Cloud. 

The Cloud does more than just keeping your presentation secure. This also makes it easily accessible on your other devices. So if you need to do last-minute revisions, you can easily do so with your smartphone. 

2. Sharing is Caring

Some students learn better when you talk about the subject (audio learners), while some fare better when they read the material (visual learners). And since the majority of people learn visually, you can help them master the topic by sharing the presentation outright.

A good thing about Google Slides is that there’s no need to download and upload files to do this. All you need to do is copy and share the link – and voila – instant access. You can even share the link through your school or course’s official website. 

So when should you share this link? According to a Vanderbilt University report, it’s best to do this before your lecture. Results show that having a copy of the lesson helps students learn more.  

The benefits of the Sharing feature are not limited to just your students, though. You can also send the link to your fellow instructors – especially if they want to add something to your Google Slides. 

3. It’s All in the Presentation

It’s already hard enough to sustain the attention of students in the classroom. Now that they’re remote, the challenge is even more significant.

So if you want to keep your students tuned to your Google Slides, then you need to practice (and perfect) your presentation.

As always, it pays to prepare and map out your strategy in advance. For example, if you’re teaching younger students, engaging media may work better than a text-heavy presentation. 

Whatever strategy you pick, you should remember this: avoid reading directly off your slide. Your students can do this by themselves! 

Instead, you should discuss the information. What can the learners get from you that they won’t get from the Google Slides? Remember: that’s why you’re teaching them in the first place. 

Another technique you could try is telling a story. Students will better relate to real-life stories. It’s easier to grasp concepts with a concrete, relatable example. 

4. Be Visual

Remember how you lulled your students to sleep before because of your text-heavy presentations? Should you continue doing this with your Google Slides, you can’t expect your learners to pay any attention at all.

If you want to sustain their attention, then you need to be creative with your presentation. You need to be visual. 

This starts with using the proper presentation design. You don’t want to use a template with too many distracting colors. They’re confusing, if not headache-inducing. As such, it’s best to go with a simple, professionally made Google Slides Templates.

Additionally, you should keep everything else to a minimum. Avoid using clipart, sounds, music, or animations. They make your Google Slides look confusing – and a tad bit amateurish. 

It would be best if you used techniques that actually promote learning. Good examples include:

  • Bolded, italicized, or highlighted key points
  • Short phrases instead of lengthy paragraphs
  • Bulleted or numbered lists instead of heavy text
  • Relevant pictures
  • Instructional videos 

5. Link your sources

Maybe your students want to delve deeper into a topic you’ve just discussed. Instead of replying to every query, it’s best to embed the link on the get-go. With this, your learners can access the references you’ve used, be it an e-Book, whitepaper report, or video presentation.

6. Ask for Feedback

You won’t know if you’ve given a good presentation if you don’t ask your learners. 

Getting feedback is an excellent way to improve your Google Slides presentation. Maybe they have suggestions that will enhance the overall eLearning experience. 

As they’re the ones on the receiving end of the spectrum, your experience is entirely different from theirs. As an instructor, you owe it up to them to make the eLearning activity even better!

Indeed, Google Slides have made the whole eLearning process better. And since there’s always room for improvement, following these six tips will help you achieve them. 

5 Digital Tools for Work from Home. #WFH #Tools #Digital

The Pandemic has forever altered the future of employment, especially in terms of working from home. Remote working was thought of as a low-wage customer support role before, however as the pandemic hit the world it has drastically shifted demographics as a result of which remote working is now considered to be a new normal, full-time job. We can now complete the same task from anywhere in the world thanks to technological advancements.
With the increase in the number of remote employees and virtual teams, the number of tools and applications designed for them is increasing day by day so that the quality of work doesn’t get compromised.
In this article, we have compiled some of the tools which work best for remote working, categorised according to their specifications to make it easier for you to grasp. The remote worker’s toolkit should include the following tools:

1. Trello and Asana

Project management would have been questioned when working remotely because it’s a big deal to manage projects that need a large number of tasks to be completed in a particular sequence or workflows that require more sophisticated time control. But thanks to the new technology, it has paved the way.
Project management, organisation, and productivity are no more a hassle and can easily be managed sitting at home. From managing big projects to small tasks, everything is at your fingertips. Trello and Asana are the two best tools when it comes to project management. They both can be used as an internal tracker to keep track of the duties individually, or used by your whole team to delegate various roles to different team members. Making it convenient with a visual to-do list, letting team members know when it’s their turn to revisit a job, or keeping staff on schedule for assignments due that day.

They both may be sufficient enough to overcome the management issues but they do differ in some cause. Trello, despite having the best Kanban-style option and being budget-friendly, is not the best one as compared to Asana. As it offers more options and is responsible for the creation and integration of its tasks which is not the case with Trello, as a result, it doesn’t work as smoothly as Asana does.

2. Google Slides, Sheets, Docs

Jobs are changing in unimaginable ways right now. Jobs are no longer a physical location for all of us, instead of having impromptu conversations at the coffee machine or while commuting to meetings, office staff has converted their homes into workstations. This has brought quite challenges in the workfield, especially if you’re a manager, Maintaining team morale and getting tasks on track has become much more difficult. This is where Google workspace comes to the rescue, which includes all the productivity apps, Google Sheets, Google Docs and Google Slides, and much more.

The tools of Google Sheets along with Google Docs and Slides are particularly useful for remote teams. Multiple users can easily open and update the same spreadsheet at the same time using Google Sheets without any hassle. Along with maintaining your privacy, only those people can get access to the sheet to which you have selected or given a link.

Moreover, you can preview a related file in Docs, Sheets, and Slides without having to open a new tab, allowing you to spend less time switching between applications, which means you’ll get more time for work. Content creation is made much easier with these tools, which is the core source of the business.

3. SlideModel and Canva

Since the home has turned into a workspace, business presentations have been a big question. Now is the time for the digital world to take over the conventional one. Seminars are now replaced by webinars, and to present your thoughts in such gatherings whether it’s virtual or in person you need to create persuasive presentations.
Creating presentations can be frustrating and time consuming. But thanks to SlideModel as it has made creating presentations much easier and convenient. It provides a wide range of PowerPoint templates for presentations to communicate your ideas clearly and engagingly to the audience. These highly customizable templates save much of your time, remaining can be spared on your verbal speech because that too is essential when it comes to presenting your stance.

Although, Canva has been much popular lately as a graphic design tool for people who don’t have the skills to use advanced graphic design software, or even in the field of presentations. But the difference that makes SlideModel more efficient is that you can use the templates directly in Google or Microsoft PowerPoint to edit the templates, these tools that you are already familiar with. Thus, this makes it easy to access and edit according to your requirements, while on the other hand, the process of editing in Canva is a little different.

4. Zoom and Microsoft Teams

 

You want to make sure you’re interacting with your colleagues correctly, because if the conferences and meetings are not conducted with sufficient means then the business is likely to save problems in its functioning. And with the new normal, many workforces faced a lot of trouble connecting with their workforce as they all are confined to their homes. Thus, apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams have served as a bridge to eliminate the communication gap between the employees.

You may hold video conferences with one other user or big numbers of people using Zoom and Microsoft teams. It’s not about a regular video call, though you can easily host the whole team conferences or workshops, you can utilize it according to your work base, even webinars can be conducted efficiently through these platforms. You can coauthor files with your employees in real time by sharing screens, making remote communication a lot simpler. With a few taps, you can also exchange files and go from a chat conversation to a meeting in no time.

5. Miro and Stormboard

 

Online work necessitates remote brainstorming. One way to achieve this is to use an online whiteboard to simulate the feel of whiteboarding in the workplace. And for that Miro and Stormboard work the best.

They will assist in immersive collaborative brainstorming and project planning in a more visual way. it’s a breeze to share all of your data and collaborate while you go. Setting a workflow framework makes the team aware of what’s going on while you put forward the details which will help them work more effectively. Thus, remote worker’s tool kits should include such resources as well.

Conclusion

Today’s workers must be able to do their work well at home, to do so they must have access to the tools they need to be as efficient as they are in the workplace. There’s no mystery that everybody works in their way and faces different obstacles. However, if our issues are related to organization and competitiveness, consider implementing one of the tools mentioned above and you’ll work that thing out for sure.

Remote employees are more likely to be healthy and happy if they have all of these remote job resources in their pockets. Because being adaptive to new tools and digital ways will only help us survive through these hard times, as the new normal is likely to last a little longer.