How to Start Slides in the Classroom

Ever feel like your day in the classroom is a bit, scrambled? It happens to us all. The best laid plans just don’t always play out as we hoped. However, there is a way to avoid this. Using Daily Slides with your class can dramatically improve the flow of your day, amongst bettering other areas as well. Today I’ll show you the steps to start slides in your own classroom.

What are “Daily Slides?”

Before we dive in, let’s clarify what exactly I mean by “Daily Slides.” In general, these are Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoints prepared in advance for the classroom. Daily Slideshows cover the entire day in class from start to finish. Every beat, transition, and subject have a slide or multiple slides. Likewise, academic content is embedded into the slides as well, providing teaching points, visuals, timers, directions, videos, and more.

Why Start Slides?

You have been lesson planning and working for years without them, so why start now? The benefits are endless, but I’ll outline some of my favorite reasons below:

• Help Teachers Plan Richer Lessons: Using slides to plan your day helps you consider each step of a lesson in a systematic and visual way. This takes lessons from conceptual to practical for students.
• Offer Visuals for All Learners: All learners will benefit from the added visuals in the classroom. Students constantly refer to the board to see what they should be working on. This helps them make connections and stay on task.
• Create Flow in the Classroom: As mentioned earlier, the flow of the day can be wildly improved by this practice. No more searching for lesson plans-it’s in the slides! No more running back and forth to your computer to pull up a video-it’s in the slides!
• Make Way for More Effective Teaching: Of all the benefits, this one is my cornerstone. Slides are the roadmap of my lessons. Without them, it’s easy to get lost. Slides help me be my best and most confident self.
• Can Be Reused Year After Year: After creating your slide sets, they’ll continue to serve you year after year. When your unit comes up, just refresh your slides, editing or tweaking things to work even better than they did the past year.
• Substitutes Love Them: Giving subs a visual to guide them through the day is so much easier to follow than a written sub plan!
• Distance Learning Friendly: I cannot tell you HOW MANY families have raved about slides during these days! Whether due to illness or weather, distance learning is a term we must all be familiar with. Slides have been a game changer for my students during these times.

How to Get Started…

Now that you know the what and the why, its time to provide you with some action steps! In this case, I’ll walk you through actions for creating slides for one unit of study. As you design more with slides you can later add on or create Daily Slides as mentioned above.

Prep Work:

Walk through these steps before the creation starts:

1. Look at Your Scope and Sequence: Take a look at what’s coming up for your class over the next few weeks. Find times where you will be introducing a new topic or unit of study. Preferably, you will create your first slide set for a new unit.
2. Select Your Topic: There are two methods here. One, pick the new unit or topic that most interests you. Select the one you are excited about so you’ll be ready to bring your energy into the slide creation process. Two, pick the new unit or topic that least interests you! Why? Because creating slides for that topic will actually make you more excited and prepared to teach on it! You do you.
3. Gather Your Materials: Have the standards, teaching guides, and any other expected materials nearby while planning your slides.
4. Set Aside Time: Expect your first slide set to take between one and three hours to design (depending on the length of the unit.) You’ll get faster, I promise!

Slide Creation Steps…

Once you have your prep work done, its time. Let’s make some slides!

In case you’ve never used slides before, we’ll begin with basic steps on navigating the slides platform. For clarity purposes, I’ll only be explaining steps in regards to Google Slides.

1. First, login or create a Google account (it’s free.) Then locate Google Slides.
2. Next, select a slide template. Pick a free template on Google Slides or a website called SlidesGo. Paid slide templates can be found on SlidesGo and Teachers Pay Teachers. (Struggling to decide amongst all the choices? Start with this template!)
3. Pick your favorite slide in the template. This will be your recurring “title” slide for each new day in the template. If my topic was on States of Matter, my title slide would say “States of Matter-Day 1” and then repeat for each day in the unit.
4. Create Repeat Slides: Following your title slide will be your recurring slides. Have key vocabulary or standards you want to discuss often? Create a slide for these next. You will copy and paste these slides into multiple days.
5. Design Daily Lessons: Similar to the traditional lesson plan model, you’ll start building your lesson plan for each day in the unit on the slides. Asking a discussion question? Create a slide for it. Doing a partner activity? Put it on a slide. Having students watch a video? Embed it into the slides.
6. Add Visuals: Equally (if not more) important than slide wording are the visuals. Add in applicable graphic organizers, images of any work pages being done during the lesson (or an image of the lesson book.)

Final Tips

As you continue to create lessons on slides, it becomes more fluid and self explanatory. Here are other tips I’ve learned over my 8 years of making slides:

• Batching is Better: Instead of creating units one week at a time, batch an entire unit in one setting. For example, with my “States of Matter” unit, I made all the slides for the three weeks of content at one time.
• Start Somewhere: I look back at some of my first ever slides and am amazed at how far I’ve come! It doesn’t have to be perfect, you just have to start!
• Less is More: Instead of typing out paragraphs onto slides (not recommended,) use bullet point lists or key phrases. Keep the slides simple instead of busy. Students will process more information when it is presented clearly!

The Resource You Need

When you are ready use Daily Slides, I have a resource that will make creating them a total BREEZE. The Neutral Patterned Daily Slide set has over 80 beautifully designed slides with custom headers and features that will make using slides easier than ever. Learn more about them here!

Finally, I have a COURSE coming soon that I’m SO excited to share with you! The whole goal of the course is to take you from confused to confident at creating and implementing slides in your classroom! Join the Waitlist here to get notified as soon as the course goes live!

Best wishes as you start using slides in your classroom!

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• The Great Pencil Challenge
• 4 Ways to Spice Up your Math Block
• Make the Magic: How to Introduce Class Songs