How many times have you given your students a Google Slides or PowerPoint presentation and they just clicked through it rather than using the buttons provided? Frustrating isn’t it? The point of the activity is for them to click in the places we want them to click and yet, either by accident or on purpose, they always seem to miss things by randomly clicking elsewhere on the slide. Today I’m going to show you how to fix this problem. I’ll warn you now: this can be time consuming! But, it is worth it in the end. This post gives step-by-step instructions, but if you prefer a video, skip to the end.
First, as always, design your slides elsewhere, I usually use PowerPoint, even if I’m going to be giving my students a PowerPoint in the end. Doing the design work this way prevents any accidental (or accidentally-on-purpose) deletion or editing of the slide contents. When designing your slides be sure to create words or “buttons” that students will click on to “answer” the questions. Each feedback slide (tells students if they were correct or not) needs to include a “button” that links to the next question. Once you have all of the parts designed, save your PowerPoint slides as images.
- Click on “Save As”
- Change the file type to either .jpg or .png, either will work.
- Tell it to save all slides and wait a moment. A new folder will be created with images of each slide.
You are now ready to create your file that will ultimately be shared with students. You want to import all of those images you just created and set them as the background.
- In PowerPoint the easy way to do this is, in a new PowerPoint file, choose Insert, Photo Album, New Photo Album. You can then use the Insert From File/Disk option to navigate to your stored pictures, select them all, and insert them.
- In Google Slides there is an add-on that makes this easier. Click on Add-ons, Get Add-ons, and search for Slides Toolbox.
- Once it’s been installed click on Add-ons
- Slides Toolbox
- Open
- Import Tools
- Create slides from images
- Check the Set as Page background box
- Next
- Upload
- Select files from your device, then navigate to where you stored the files and select them all.
If you have a lot of slides this will take a couple of minutes, but it is still much faster than doing them one-by-one.
Now that you have all of your slides set up as images/backgrounds, it is time to start making the magic happen. The first thing we want to do is make it so students cannot advance slides by clicking anywhere. To do this we are going to link each slide to itself.
- On the first slide use the shape tools to draw a rectangle that covers the entire slide.
- Copy that rectangle and move down through the slides, pasting the rectangle on each remaining slide.
- Go back to your first slide and click on the rectangle. Change the rectangle so it is transparent in color and has a transparent border. Then click the hyperlink button (looks like a linked chain) and choose the same slide (so if you are on slide 2, link to slide 2).
- Go down through the slides, clicking on each rectangle, making the rectangle clear with a clear border, and linking each slide to itself (slide 3 gets linked to slide 3, slide 4 links to slide 4…).
Now, if you put the presentation into present mode, you can click anywhere on the slides but they will not advance.
Making the slides advance is the next step:
- Back in edit mode, go to your first slide.
- Using the shape tool again, draw a shape (I always use rectangles, but any shape will do) over where you want students to click to “answer” the question. Be sure to make a separate shape for each answer possibility.
- Make your shape clear with a clear border.
- Click on the hyperlink button again. This time you are going to hyperlink to the slide that tells students if they are correct or not. You can choose to have separate correct/incorrect slides, or have one slide that shows the correct answer and gives an explanation. Just be sure to link to the slide that has the feedback you want to give for that particular answer.
- You will need to repeat this process for each answer on each slide.
- Once you finish the question slides you will need to repeat the process to add a box to each feedback slide linking students to the next question.
A lot of work, I know, but it really is worth it. The good news is that once you finish creating all of your answer and next question buttons, you are done. Put your slides in present mode and try them out…pretty cool, huh? If you prefer video tutorials, here is a short one:
Happy task card creating, everyone! Next week I’ll show you how to create self-grading task cards in Sheets/Excel that can be used as an assessment, it’s my new favorite digital task card delivery method!
The Gaming Grammarian 