Online Agendas: Using Google Slides To Keep Students and Parents Informed

Google Slides is a powerful tool to use in the classroom. From student collaborative activities, to direct instruction by you, to an excellent opportunity to show screencasts of processes, Google Slides is an important tool to use in the classroom throughout the year. The final products are easy to share and between Google Sites and Schoology, teachers in our district have an opportunity to push out content to students and parents with ease.

One other great use of Google Slides is the class Agenda. Agendas are a great tool for students and parents to see what is happening in the classroom. It helps the teacher stay organised as well. Have a student who has been out for some time, no need for them to ask you for the work or what they missed, they can check the class Agenda. In the past, agendas are only as visible as they were left on the whiteboard or chalkboard. Technology allows for those Agendas to be permanent, and interactive. Google Slides is an excellent tool for this as well!!

A friend of mine, Tech-guru, podcast host, and all-around good guy working as a TOSA in the Roseville district, Ryan O'Donnell shared with me how he uses Google Slides for this purpose a while ago. Much like I use the same Google Slide deck for my weekly Tuesday Tech Tips, the agenda is used in this manner. You will always put the most recent week's agenda as "Slide 1" so any student or parent accessing the file will see that week's agenda first. The previous ones will be in descending order as they click the next slide on the slide deck. Below is the TTT Slide deck for you to see how it flows.



I made some Agendas for each site based on his example. The templates I have made give you an idea of things you can do on your agenda. After you have access to the templates and make a copy of your own, you can customize it however you'd like.

Here's how:

1. Access the Agenda Templates
2. "Make a Copy" of the Agenda from your school
3. Open the file and make any changes you would like - this file is now owned by you and you can tailor it to your needs
4. Delete elements I created in the file and fill in the necessary information you would like to pass along to students and parents
• Add images, video, text, links to assignments and outside resources, etc.
5. Google saves your last keystroke when you have online access so no need to save
6. When you want to make the next week's agenda, all you need to do is make a "Duplicate Slide" and then make changes to the one in the top position

To Add to Google Sites:

Google Sites embeds Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Forms, Maps and other products seamlessly on your site

To Add to Schoology:

If you need some assistance with this process or anything else, please let me know and I'll walk you through it.