Five Interesting Ways to Use Slides Besides Presentations

Most teachers and students have a baseline comfort with PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Keynote. Move beyond that baseline and you’ll find some interesting ways to use slides for classroom projects. If you’re looking to move yourself or your students beyond making basic slideshow presentations, read on for my favorite ways to use slides besides making presentations.

Create an Animated Video

Over a decade ago Common Craft popularized a new style of video using very simple animations to craft clear explanations of complex topics. Students make that same style of video by using some clipart, some basic slide transitions, and a screencasting tool like Screencastify. That process is demonstrated using Google Slides in this short video. This same process can be done with PowerPoint or Keynote in place of using Google Slides.

Create Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

This is a project that I helped a fourth grade class do a few years ago. The students wrote short stories in Google Slides. The ending of their stories had three possible outcomes. Each outcome was linked to the final paragraph of their stories. When readers got to the last paragraph they could click to choose the ending they wanted to read. In this video I demonstrate how to create choose-your-own adventure stories in Google Slides. This video will show you how to do the same thing in PowerPoint.

Make Interactive Charts and Diagrams

Using the same hyperlinking concept that is applied to create choose-your-own adventure stories, you can have students make interactive diagrams of just about any process or sequence. I’ve had students make interactive diagrams to mock-up mobile apps and I’ve had them make interactive diagrams of trouble-shooting processes. When I taught U.S. History I had students make interactive diagrams of the branches of government. This video provides a demonstration of that process in Google Slides.

Place Yourself in Front of Any Landmark

Use the background remover in PowerPoint to remove the background from a picture of yourself. Then you can add a new background image to virtually place yourself in front of any landmark in the world. I’ve done things like this to prompt students to write about virtual visits to the landmarks they choose to include in their slides. Watch this to learn how to use the background remover in PowerPoint.

This same idea can be accomplished in Google Slides. The difference is that you’ll need to use an external tool to remove the image background. Photoscissors makes it easy to remove the background from a photograph of yourself and then overlay that new image on a Google Slide of a famous landmark or any pretty scenery of your choice. Here’s my demo of that process.

Turn Slides Into Videos

Narakeet is a neat tool that will take any PPTX (PowerPoint) file and turn it into narrated. All of the common slideshow creation tools (Google Slides, Keynote, Canva) will let you export your slides as a PPTX to use in Narakeet. Here’s a short demonstration of how it works.

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