GAIN

Today I learned a lot about Google Presentations.  While I have to admit my knowledge about PowerPoint is fairly basic, I found Google Presentations to be almost as user friendly as the features I have used in PowerPoint.

I enjoyed the fact that Google Presentations would automatically save your presentation every few seconds.  This feature came in especially handy for me, as I was working on putting together a presentation and the internet went down.  When it came back up, my presentation looked exactly as it did prior to the internet disconnection.

A feature that I did not find as user-friendly was that fact that in order to import personal photos, you first have to put them into Google photos.  I was unable to add the images straight from my iphoto program into a Google Presentation. While importing the photos into Google was easy, it was an extra time-consuming step.  In the tutorial I also learned that you can import additional templates and I thought that was a nice feature.  However, when I went to import a photo album template like shown in the tutorial, the option to import additional templates was not listed in my drop-down menu.

Additionally,  I liked the font options presented and there were a variety of background choices. There were also multiple options for pulling in internet images, which could be useful for educators who do not happen to have that collection of pictures on their computer.  Animation could also be added to your presentation, which further enhances its attractiveness.

I also like the fact that I could import previously made PowerPoint presentations and use those slides in Google Presentations.  Not only could they just be used, but they could also be edited and the backgrounds changed to match the template you picked in Google. I explored this option and was able to pull in slides with ease.

Overall, I found Google Presentations to be easy to use with multiple options. The cost benefits and the sharing benefits of this technology make it very appealing.  The collaborative nature of this will aid students in fulfilling Common Core Standards. (Anchor Standard 5: Speaking and Listening).  A feature that I did not use in my presentation but that would be advantageous to students is the ability to add notes to the bottom of each slide and then the ability to print those notes.  During the editing process, students can add notes regarding the information they are adding to the slide to help better inform their class partners as to why this information was edited.

Lastly, the cloud storage offered for this program makes it nice in that your presentation follows you to any computer with internet access.  This feature is particularly nice for busy students and teachers.

My presentation can be found at:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19r87tDt7Q0NLEFbyC-rwZ3UnV3loMbhJsM7I0RC0skI/edit?usp=sharing