Gain: Presentations

Google Slides

1.  The functions of Google Slides are really very similar to that of PowerPoint.  This is really great because most people have some experience with PowerPoint and those acquired skills can be transferred over to Slides very easily.  The only real difference in the interface is the toolbar.  There are not multiple tool bars in Slides, instead there are lists that scroll down.  I really prefer the multiple tool bars over the lists, but that is not the major difference between the two.  There are three differences in Google Slides that makes it superior to PowerPoint: Sharing, Collaboration, and Price.

Sharing

It is easy to share Slides so long as you have internet.  As soon as a Slide is made, Google provides a unique URL to go with it.  All you have to do is copy and paste that URL and the Slide can be shared with anyone.  This can be very helpful in a classroom.  I could imagine putting the URL to different presentations right in the syllabus at the beginning of a semester for students so that they could go over the lecture notes for an exam.

Collaboration

Just like in Google Docs, Slides let the users collaborate on the same presentation at the same time.  They can edit the same material and even use a chat feature. This is an even more useful function in Slides than it was in Docs because generally, presentations are more likely to be a group project than a word document in the classroom setting.

Price

All of the Google Apps are free.  

Here is a presentation that I made originally on PowerPoint, but edited today on Slides. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QfyIE57J7-xt7AIF4jU3pqNuCK-XgvdHET6iQOr5tcg/edit#slide=id.p4 

I had no trouble at all getting it into Google's format, actually it was already there waiting for me when I went into my Drive account.  One of the things I was most impressed with was how easy it was to insert a video.  I always seem to have trouble with that in PowerPoint.  But with Slides you can just hit the insert tab and select video, which brings you to a search bar that takes video straight off of YouTube.

2.  The book details a lot of the ways that Google Slides helps teachers meet Common Core Standards.  But a lot of those can also be met by PowerPoint.  The area where Slides outdoes PowerPoint is in the 9-12 grade range as described on page 73 of Graham.  The high school standards describe using technology to "produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products."  This "shared" designation becomes more frequent in high school standards and it is an area of the Common Core that can be very easily addressed with Google Slides.  As mentioned above, Slides allows users to collaborate on the same presentation and use a chat function.  Therefore students do not need to coordinate schedules or stay after school, they could just work on the assignment from their bedrooms.  This makes collaboration easier, which means it can happen more frequently.  When I was in high school, collaborative projects were actually pretty rare.  But today with Google Slides, it could become a weekly assignment.  That is something that appears to be a goal of the continually evolving standards and I believe it will be met by Google Slides.