Tuesday Tech Tidbit

Many teachers share slideshows with their students that demonstrate learning concepts.  These are particularly helpful when students want to access information from a past lecture or a tutorial.  Apple's amazing slideshow production app, Keynote, offers a simple way for you to add live video to a presentation. With Keynote's Live Video feature, teachers can insert themselves into a presentation so students can see and hear what they have to say about a presentation.  Instead of just reading text on a screen, students get to see and hear their teacher.  You can also use the rear camera on your iPad to record live footage of a concept you wish to demonstrate in your presentation.  This is a great way to bring students up to speed if they missed an important lab.   When used in conjunction with screen recording on your iPad, you can create movie presentations for your students or professional learning communities.  Quickly make tutorials that contai...

Students often ask us in the media center how to print slide show presentations.  Often we discover that the slides have been formatted in a way that makes them look wonky when printing full page.  This is easy to fix ... if the presentation is formatted correctly at the very beginning.   By default, Google presentations are formatted to play in a widescreen format (16:9 ratio).  This size does not correspond to the size of a piece of paper.  Printing a widescreen presentation will squash the slides and will not fill the page.  If you want to make your presentation print-friendly, you must change the page margins before designing your slide show.  Here's how: Changing slide size on desktop computer: Select File > Page setup . Change the page size from widescreen to Custom . Type 11" x 8.5" Changing slide size on iPad: Open Safari. Type the address slides.google.com Start a new presentation. Select  File  >  Page setup . Cha...

We've all wanted to play a specific section of a YouTube video to our class.  Time is wasted while you navigate to the section.  Wouldn't it be great if you could automatically jump to a predetermined starting or ending point when playing a YouTube video?  Spoiler alert.  You can. I will demonstrate here how generated custom starting and ending points when inserting a YouTube video into a Google slide.  This technique is useful when playing slides to your classes, but it will also help with  resource sharing in Google Classroom.  The video below demonstrates how to start and end videos at fixed points in Google slides.  

Slides Timer is a nifty Chrome extension that allows you to easily a timer to a Google slide.  While in presentation mode you can have a timer counting up or counting down from a time that you designate.  Slides Timer also allows you to add the current time to a slide while in presentation mode.  This extension is useful for timing a class activity, displaying a daily agenda, or pacing a presentation. Slides Timer is a free Chrome extension that can be found at the Chrome web store.  It only works in the Chrome web browser.  Once it is installed on your Chrome browser, Slides Timer works quietly in the background without you needed to engage with it.  Here is a link to Slides Timer in the Chrome web store . After you install Slides Timer, insert a text box in a Google slide.  In the text box, type a timer command in closed << >> brackets.  For example, to start a three minute countdown timer, type <<3:00->>.  To start ...