3rd Grade Google Presentations

3rd graders have been working on creating Google Presentations in Drive.

The theme, and title, is "What History Means to Me" which is essentially an extension of a previously written essay created as a Google Document.

The original Document was an introduction to using Google Drive; comparing and contrasting to Microsoft Word, and so forth. The actual writing was fairly self directed. I gave students a prompt: "to me history means..." and then it was up to them to define "history." For some students history is all about family. For others it is all about learning in school. History is the past, but the aspects of the past that stand out for each student vary child to child.

Once the essay was finished I introduced them to Presentations. We talked about slides as opposed to paragraphs, bullet points as opposed to sentences, the different style and voice used to convey the same content. They then began to turn their "History" documents into Presentations, able to edit, update, and alter in any way they saw fit.

The overall project is a few months in the making because we cover:

• creating slides
• adding titles
• adding bullets
• what defines a bullet
• short 
• to the point
• detailed 
• statement
• creating sub-bullets and why you might want one
• adding the actual bullet point graphics
• difference in punctuation of a bullet as opposed to a sentence
• bullets can be a list
• don't' necessarily need periods
• if you're asking a question you do need a question mark
• main bullets should start with capital letters
• sub-bullets can start with lowercase
• be consistent across slides with how you format your bullets
• editing and revising text
• just as you would in any writing assignment
• spelling matters 
• making sure titles and bullets match up and make sense
• adding relevant pictures
• proper searching
• inserting
• re-sizing
• animating everything
• "automatically" vs "on click"
• re-ordering (tile before bullets)
• adding slide transitions
• experimenting with themes
• making sure the theme doesn't distract from slide content
• re-formatting slides to avoid themes overlapping text & pictures
• having a classmate watch it in "Present" mode and giving feedback
• presenting their Presentation to the whole class

It's a lot. But We try to make these presentations as refined and professional as possible.

Here are a few example of 3rd grade "What History Means to Me" Google Presentations...

3-410

Emmet

Mae

Cori

Sasha

Francesca

3-412

Nathaniel

Antonio

Lucas

Eamon

Nihma

Kaithlyn

Marcel

Jonathan 

Jaylen

3-415

Joseph

Hannah

Maks

Freya

Luke

Jeremiah

Nathaniel

Sophia

Margot

Mariya

Clementine

Eleanor

William

3-416

Luke

Vanessa

more to come...