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Educators have been very excited to explore the possibilities of inserting audio into Google Slides. If you haven’t heard, teachers and students may now record audio and then insert the audio clip into their presentations. But how do we use this feature? Do we just record ourselves reading the content of each Slide? No way! Here are some different ideas for using the Google Slides audio feature in education.

Elaborating on Your Ideas

We know that Slides should have a limited amount of text during presentations. Often, presenters simply share a few bullet points or phrases on a Slide. However, this often means that the audience may forget what exactly the presenter said about this Slide when they go back and revisit. Adding audio clips in the margins will allow your audience to recall the information and teaching points. And, presenters may include additional information as well.

Accessibility/Directions

Educators are using the G Suite for Education with even our youngest learners. Many educators are making their Google Slides interactive by creating hyperdocs or including activities or formative assessments in their Slides. But, what if students are having difficulty reading the directions? Adding audio directions alongside your text directions will surely be helpful for all learners.

Narrating Your eBook or Newsletters

Many students and teachers are transforming their Google Slides presentations into ebooks and newsletters. Simply change the Page Layout to Custom and select 8.5 x ll inches. Now you will have an ebook suitable for sharing and printing. Users may now add audio clips to narrate their work which often helps them locate errors for revising while doing so. And, students that are limited in their typing or writing skills may elaborate more on their stories by including these narrations alongside their work.

Using Audio Clips as an Answer Choice

If you use Google Slides for activities or formative assessments you may want to consider using the audio as an answer choice. Many people do not realize that you can change the image on the audio recording by right clicking on the image and selecting Replace.

To make this happen, I decided to create the images first. I used Google Drawings to create new images that I would use for the answer choices. In this assignment the answers choices were limited to A or B, however there are so many different images you could include for answer choices across the curriculum.

For example:

• Photographs of locations for geography questions
• Shapes and figures for geometry
• Images of science topics
• Numbers for computations

Next, I recorded audio explaining if the selection was correct or incorrect. The student then will hear an audio recording and explanations while completing the activities.

Recording sounds for spelling sorts or tests

Many teachers use Google Slides for drag and drop activities. If you teach spelling you will now be able to make the audio recordings and include them in the headings or as the answer. Students will click on the audio recording to hear the sounds and will be able to complete their sorts. You could even make ALL the spelling words drag and drop audio clips!

Track reading fluency

It’s often difficult to track progress in oral fluency. Google Slides audio would simplify the process by allowing teachers or students to insert an image of text that was being read as well as an audio recording of the student reading the text. Teachers and students could then add comments, feedback or suggestions.

Foreign Language Practice/Translations

Adding audio to Google Slides could really help students improve their foreign language skills and improve their pronunciations. Teachers could post words and phrases allowing students to hear correct pronunciations. Or, students could insert recordings reading words and phrases for teachers.

How do you use Slides audio? I’d love to hear your ideas!

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Google Slides just recently received the capability to add audio to your slides! Simply click on INSERT and select AUDIO to add a file from your Google Drive. Unfortunately, the ability to upload files from your computer is currently unavailable.

Why add audio?

1. Add audio recordings of thinking and explanations.
2. Add narrations to presentations or digital books.
3. Add audio directions for younger students.
4. Explaining diagrams, maps or information.
5. Add music to enhance presentations.

How may I add audio?

There are hundreds of audio recording tools available, however I prefer to use the Chrome extensions Cloud Audio Recorder or Mic Note as they will save audio files directly into my Google Drive. This will make it simple to insert the audio into my Google Slides.

Step 1: Add the Chrome Extension Cloud Audio or Mic Note

Step 2: Open the app and record audio

Step 3: Save audio into Google Drive. Cloud audio will do that automatically, while Mic Note will need you to switch the Option to Google Drive.

Step 4: Open Slides and go to Insert- Audio. You’re done!

Video Tutorial

Ideas? I’d love to hear from you!

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Why Google Slides?

Teachers and students are loving Google Slides for digital storytelling projects. For years, Google Slides was known for presentations but now educators have found dozens of innovative ways to use Google Slides in the classroom. Google Slides allows students to collaborate, add music and videos, receive feedback, insert images, work from a template, research information, and add animations and transitions.There are so many features that allow even the youngest students to create a pretty impressive picture book. Hopefully, this blog will provide you with many different ideas.

In this blog, we are going to look at a presentation created by my 8 year old son as an example.

1. View the Presentation

View the presentation by clicking here. You should hear audio and narration.

2. Adding Music

There is a fun “hack” to add music and narration to finished slideshows. First, go to INSERT-VIDEO and choose a video from YouTube or your Google Drive that has music. Then, resize the video to make it as small as possible and place it in the corner of the slide. Next, change the video format settings so that the video starts playing as soon as you present the slideshow. You do this by clicking on the video and selecting FORMAT in the toolbar. Now, you may checking off the box to autoplay. Your music will now start automatically once you click PRESENT.

I selected “Mute audio” for the video on Slide 7 so that you could watch the action taking place, but not necessarily hear all the distracting and unnecessary audio. You may also set the start and end time for video playback.

3. Inserting narration

We used the Screencastify extension to record my son narrating each page. Screencastify is normally used to create a video of your screen, but we are simply using it to record the audio while narrating the digital picture book. Then, we will follow the steps noted above.

My son named each Screencastify video as Slide 1, Slide 2, and Slide 3 etc. so that we would easily be able to locate them while inserting them into the presentation. He then used the brand new Screencastify Add-on to insert the videos into each page. As mentioned above, we then resized the video and set the formatting to allow the video to play as soon as the slide appears.

Another option would be to use Screencastify to record the entire slideshow at once instead of page-by-page. Then, you could share your presentation as a video.

4. Using a template with placeholders

We did not use a theme for this presentation. I did however create a template for my son to use by copying and pasting text boxes with image placeholders for editing. To edit each placeholder, we clicked on the shape and selected REPLACE IMAGE in the toolbar. This allowed my son to easily add images without having to resize and crop them. It also added some uniformity throughout the presentation. I created different placeholders using the cropping tool. Or, check out SlidesCarnival.com for some awesome FREE templates.

5. Creating and Adding Clipart

Clipart was created using ABCYA’s Paint program. My son quickly sketched his clipart and then saved it as a PNG file. This made it simple to click and drag the png file into the digital storybook. Or, we could have selected INSERT-IMAGE-UPLOAD. Did you notice the spelling “Mikey Mouse”? 🙂 ABCYA Paint is a great option for elementary school students.

In lieu of actual photographs, we could have created a picture book completely using student created clipart. Another option would be to add photographs of illustrations by selecting INSERT-IMAGE-CAMERA and taking a photograph. PhotosforClass.com also has many copyright-friendly images with citations included.

6. Auto-Advance Each Slide

When you publish a slideshow, an option appears that allows you to set the timer to auto-advance each slide. Due to the length of his narration, we set the timer to 5 seconds. You can also check off the box to restart the presentation when finished. Finally, this option makes it easy to copy the embed code and add the presentation to your blog or Google Site.

Do you have any tricks for creating picture books with Google Slides?