Taking Google Presentations for a Test Drive (Pun Intended)

I was impressed by the collaborative features of the presentation program in Google Drive.  In many ways, Google Presentations is similar to PowerPoint and Keynote, so most students who are familiar with these programs should be able to adapt and use Google Presentations with little to no specific instruction.  Like PowerPoint and Keynote, Google Presentations allows the user to choose templates and layouts; create slides; arrange slides; insert text, images, and video; and select from various transition options.  However, I would only opt to use Google Presentations if I specifically wanted to use it for collaborative purposes due to its unique sharing, commenting and editing features. PowerPoint and Keynote have a great deal more design, format, and layout options, which are valuable for encouraging and facilitating creativity and effective visual communication skills.

I reviewed the middle school language arts lesson plan titled "Choose Your Own Adventure Story."  For this lesson, students were required to work in pairs to compose a Choose Your Own Adventure Story about leprechauns and to create a non-linear presentation in which the audience selected different hyperlinked options which determined which slide they would view next, and hence, how the story would progress.  I appreciated that the lesson plan included example presentations, specific instructions for linking to slides within a Google Drive presentation, video tutorials, an evaluation method, NCTE and ISTE NETS-S standards for students, and a detailed scoring rubric.  I especially liked the provided Flow Chart & Presentation Template, which gives the students clear guidance in how to format their story/presentation.  This is one lesson plan that I can see myself "stealing" and adapting for use in my own classroom.