Lightening the Load of Carrying Textbooks

Photo courtesy of Shena Macdonald

USING GOOGLE DRIVE TO HOST LEARNING CONTENT

Over the years Mrs Moore has built many wonderful powerpoints that were saved on our school server and as I mentioned previously we would have days when we couldn’t access our material, so we began using Slideboom to host Powerpoints. This meant that when the server was misbehaving we could teach off the internet. It also meant learners could view class PPTS (powerpoints at home). However Slideboom does not have a edit function so we were delighted with the Google Presentation functions on Drive. Uploading PPTS to Google Drive allows you to convert them to Google Presentations which can be edited online and shared with learners. Learners can also make copies of the presentations which they can edit and add to. There is also the comment function on Google presentations which facilitates online discussions. Enabling learners to access learning material at home assists them with studying for exams.  Sharing content online, also allowed us to share colour resources with the learners as well as provide links to research articles that we felt would broaden their understanding of the visual art syllabus.


Thus our Google Presentations function as digital textbooks. The immediacy of producing online content means that we can create content on current events, but I will write more about that in another post. 

So the first step to enabling learners to access online content is to place it your Google Drive Cupboard. You can do this by uploading existing content from your computer onto Google Drive.

Link to Tutorial on Uploading Presentations

Remember that the file size needs to be small so that content loads faster online. One way to reduce file size is to compress images or break a large powerpoint into smaller sections.

 Link to Tutorial on compressing images on Powerpoint 

You can also generate content online by creating new documents in Google Drive.

Link to Tutorial on creating Google Presentations

 Link to Tutorial on adding content to Google Presentations

The next step is sharing the content with the learners.

 Link to Tutorial on sharing settings on Google Presentations 

And finally how would you like the learners to access your content?

We like to use a blog to host the links, so the next few posts will be about that and I will add some links here once they are done.

Link to PPT on creating links in Blog Post