Three Ways to Turn Your Old Slides Into New Lessons and Games

Peter Allen’s song Everything Old Is New Again came to my mind as I started to write this post. That’s because this week’s tip is about how to take some of your old favorite slideshows and turn them into new things for your students.

ClassPoint

ClassPoint is a PowerPoint add-in that lets you add questions, polls, whiteboards, and interactive quizzes to your existing slides. With ClassPoint enabled your old slideshow can be turned into a new interactive activity for your students. To interact with your slides students simply go to classpoint.app and enter a class code that you give to them. They don’t need to sign-up or sign into an account to interact with your slides.

A complete overview of ClassPoint can be watched here or read here.

Formative

Formative is a tool that I’ve used for the last six or seven years to turn pictures, PDFs, and Google Slides into interactive learning and assessment activities. One of the many features that Formative offers is the ability to upload pictures and PDFs or import Google Slides to which you can add interactive markers. You can add quiz questions into those interactive markers or simply add some additional clarifying information for your students.

If your old slides are in PowerPoint format, save them as PDF before importing them into Formative to make them interactive. If your slides are in Google Slides format, you can import them directly into Formative to make them interactive. Jump to the 1:22 mark in this video to see how I like to use Formative.

Lumio

Lumio is a service from SMART that you can use to take your existing PowerPoint slides or Google Slides and turn them into a variety of learning activities for your students to complete online. Some of those activities include virtual manipulatives, whole-class games, and individual games. In fact, Lumio offers a dozen templates that you can use to create games with your slides.

Bonus! Turn Slides Into Narrated Videos

Narakeet is a tool that you can use to have your PowerPoint slides turned into a narrated video lesson for your students to watch. Narakeet offers twenty voice-over options to pick from. You can adjust the speed of the voice-over and choose to have captions automatically added into your video. Watch this video to see how Narakeet works.

50 Tech Tuesday Tips & Workshops

50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created for busy teachers and tech coaches who are looking for some ideas to use and share in your school.

I offer on-site and online workshops on a variety of educational technology topics. Book me for an in-person workshop in 2023 and I’ll include copies of my eBook for all of your staff. Send me an email or fill out this form to learn more.