BTBGuide: Dynamic Content: Slideshows

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Be There with Blogging: A Guide for Teachers

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I don't use slideshows to share content with students, but I have found one really excellent use of Google Slides for my purposes: I create a slideshow each semester of the student projects in each of my classes, and then I combine the slides in both shows for a presentation of all the projects across both classes.

I also got a randomizer add-on so that I can randomize the order of the slides (I try to do that daily if I remember) so that they're in a different order, with everybody having an equally random chance of coming early in the show.

I then embed this slideshow in various places: it's part of our class projects pages, for example, and I embed the shows in Canvas, and it's also in the sidebar of the Daily Announcements blog! Here you can see how it looks in Canvas:

I like the way this includes every project in a small space, and the slideshow is forever playing in the sidebar of the Announcements blog; there is literally something new to see every few seconds, and you never know when something will catch a student's attention and make them curious to explore one of their classmate's projects.

To embed a Google Slide show in the blog, just go to File-Publish, choose the Embed tab in the dialogue box, and choose your settings. For publishing here, I set the width to 400 and Google automatically adjusts the height.

Then I just paste in the code in the HTML view of the blog, and there it is: magic! As you can see, in addition to the screenshot for each project, there's a link to the project itself, along with the comment wall where students are leaving comments for the project author. Click on a link and see for yourself! :-)

This type of slideshow is also a great example of distributed content: when I update the order of the slideshow, the latest version is what will load and appear here, along with everywhere else I have embedded the slideshow.