#375 – Interactive Slideshows: Simple Tech, Complex Thinking

#375 — Interactive Slideshows: Simple Tech, Complex Thinking

AVID Open Access
10 min

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Paul Beckermann 0:00 Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I’m your host, Paul Beckermann.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 0:05 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit Rena’s Children 0:05** Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 0:16 The topic of today’s episode is interactive slideshows: simple tech, complex thinking. While only a fraction of our students will go on to careers in computer science and actually write code, I would argue that all of our students can benefit from an introduction to the foundational skills needed to become a computer scientist. Being a critical thinker, identifying and solving problems, breaking down complex tasks into simpler steps, thinking through a task logically. These are all durable life skills that students apply when thinking like a computer scientist.

You don’t need to be a computer scientist yourself to help students develop these skills. In fact, in today’s episode, I’m going to suggest using a very simple tech tool that almost all students and teachers have already used, Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint, to develop many of these computer science-related skills. I to think of this approach as being simple technology to activate complex thinking.

So what might this look like? Essentially, you will have students teach each other content standards from your subject area by creating an interactive learning experience using either Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint. In its simplest form, these slideshows could include a few slides at the beginning that teach the concept; it doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Students can share content by including text, images, and video on the informational slides.

These slides can then be followed with an interactive quiz embedded into that same slideshow. Students could create a slide with a question on it and then several multiple-choice answers to choose from. The question might be at the top with possible answers listed at the bottom as text, or possibly as buttons created with shapes in the slideshow platform. The magic happens when students link each answer to another slide.

If there are four choices, the three wrong answers would be linked to a slide that says something, “Sorry, that’s not correct. Please try again,”. Or to take it a step further, each wrong answer could take the user to a specific slide explaining why that answer is not correct. This could be a great reteaching opportunity.

When the student clicks on the correct answer, they would be taken to a slide congratulating them on choosing the correct answer. From there, they would click on a button that would navigate them to the next question slide so they could continue the experience. In a big-picture sense, students are creating interactive learning experiences by presenting content and then linking clickable answers and ideas to different slides in the presentation and redirecting the user to feedback slides based on their answers. In many ways, this is basic computer programming. Students are designing and creating a series of if-then statements.

Paul Beckermann 5:08 If a student clicks on this answer, then they are taken to this slide. If they click on a different answer, they’re taken somewhere else instead. It’s a fairly simple process, but it’s cognitively challenging to design and implement.

While this type of question and answer kiosk format is a great starting point, you and your students can make the experience as complex as you’d like. For instance, for your teaching slides, you could go beyond static text and images and make the learning slides interactive as well. Students might utilize images with hyperlink hot spots on them to take students to slides which break down that part of the image in more depth. For example, when students click on the mitochondria in an image of a cell, they could be redirected to a more in-depth study of the mitochondria on a slide dedicated to that specific part of the cell.

This process could be repeated for the other parts of the cell as well, or perhaps your students could create an entire Jeopardy board type quiz game with a wide range of questions and answers with more complex branching. The possibilities are nearly endless.

So how do students create these? Well, one of the benefits of this approach is that most of our students already know how to create basic slides by adding text, images, shapes, arrows, and videos. While they’ll need to use these basic skills to design each slide, you probably won’t need to spend valuable class time teaching them. The key skill that they’ll need to make the slideshow interactive is hyperlinking. So you may need to spend a little time teaching this.

Students need to know how to make an image area or word clickable so that when it’s clicked, it redirects the user to a new slide. In most programs, this involves highlighting a word, object, or area and then clicking the link icon. From there, you would choose the destination slide. If someone clicks here, then they will be taken to this slide. Of course, you’ll need the destination slide created before you can link to it.

You can usually select an object by clicking on it, or a word by highlighting it. If you want to get a little more advanced and have a portion of an image be clickable, then you’ll need to insert a shape over that portion of the image that you want to be clicked. In most cases, you can select basic shapes like rectangles, triangles, and circles, and those will work fine. Make sure these are transparent and draw them on top of the portion of the image that you wish to be clicked. Then to link those, simply click the shape and use the link icon as you would with text or other objects.

So the technical part of this project is fairly simple. Once students know how to hyperlink slides, they can begin designing their learning experience. The complicated part becomes the planning and designing, and these are powerful skills to learn to make their interactive slideshow.

Students need to design the learning pathway, and they’ll need to consider questions these:

• what content will be presented and how?
• How will I design my multiple-choice options?
• What choices will I provide, and where do I need to redirect users based on their selection?
• What kind of feedback will I provide for each of these choices?

In many ways, by working through this problem-solving process, students are learning the foundational logic of coding. They’re writing a series of if-then statements similar to what someone would do when creating a computer program. The beauty of the slideshow experience is that the tool is simple, allowing students to spend their cognitive energy on logic and planning.

To break this down even further, here’s a list of some of the foundational computer science thinking skills students can develop by designing and building slideshow kiosks:

Number one: Algorithmic thinking, structuring their slides in a logical sequence, much an algorithm, to ensure correct navigation and user flow. Number two: Conditional logic, using clickable regions linked buttons to create different outcomes based on user choices, mimicking if-then logic in programming. Number three: Decomposition, breaking down a larger problem, the interactive experience, into smaller components, such as slides for content, decision points, and feedback. Four: Pattern recognition, identifying common structures for navigation and feedback that can be reused across different slides. Number five: Abstraction, designing a system where specific details, such as slide content, are secondary to the overall interactive structure. Six: Debugging, testing links and fixing errors in navigation to ensure the user experience functions as intended. And seven: The user experience or UX design, thinking about how users will interact with their slides, including intuitive design, clear choices, and engaging navigation.

Teaching computer science does not require you to be a computer science expert. Even if you’ve never engaged in computer programming yourself, you can have students use a simple tool Google Slideshow or Microsoft PowerPoint to apply computer science thinking skills at a very high level.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I to think of this as using simple technology to activate complex thinking, and you can do this while engaging students at a very high level and achieving your core content standards at the same time.

To learn more about today’s topic and explore other free resources, visit avidopenaccess.org. Specifically, I encourage you to check out the collection of articles titled Demystify Computational Thinking. And, of course, be sure to join Rena Winston and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast Unpacking Education, where we’re joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you.

Thanks for listening. Take care and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.