Michelle from The Autism Helper shows special education teachers how to speed up Google Slides prep work. Use Version History to revert slides, add images via Mac shortcuts, pull GIFs from Giphy, and hyperlink images directly to resources like Starfall so you can click and jump straight there.
Special education teachers have so much to plan and prep for on a daily basis that we need to make sure we maximize every precious minute of planning time that we get. I'm Michelle with the Autism Helper, and today I'm going to show you a couple of tricks that I use to save time using Google Slides. Now, these tricks not only save me precious time during my planning time but also time during instructional time with my students. Okay, so here are my classroom Google Slides, and I use these throughout the whole day in my classroom. My students use these to reference our daily schedule, and this is how we do our morning meeting. And so these slides have not been reset from the previous week, so what I'm going to do to save me time, I'm going to go into my version history button, which looks like a little clock. And I'm going to look for the very last editing that I did for the previous day. So I want to jump back to the previous day and make sure that those slides are all updated, and I'm going to click Restore This Version. Now what I love about my slides is that I keep everything very structured and very routine in my classroom, so I'm not changing my videos. I'm not changing my songs throughout the day, and I'm not changing my activities. So this makes changing my slides for the day very, very, very helpful. So what I do after I've reset the version history, I'm going to go in and edit how many days we have been in school because that's going to reset for the previous day. So now we're ready to count up today. Then I'm going to change my student lunch choices. And what I do here is I keep my menus bookmarked, so all I have to do is check for the day and it tells me here what the students are going to have. I keep a different slide with all of the pictures of the lunch choices down at the bottom, so all I have to do is go copy. I know it looks like a mess, but it's my mess, it's my chaos, it makes sense to me. Now this I know exactly what I'm looking for when I come in. I have this organized so that I can see everything. I know it only makes sense to me, but we do what works best for us. So what I do is I select and I press the Shift button so it will allow me to select 2 pictures at a time. So I select my cheeseburgers and I select my pizza stick and I hit the Command— let me see if— there you go, Command Command+C because that's going to copy those pictures for me. I'm gonna go all the way back to my lunch choices and I'm just gonna hit Command+V and there my pictures are. All I have to do is just arrange them ever so nicely. It's time to change my letter of the week since it is a new week, so I'm going to delete these photos and I'm going to go to Google and find my next letter, which should be letter K. And I know what I'm looking for, so I'm going to search how to write letter K. And then I'm going to go to images, and I love this image here for my students. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a screenshot. For a Mac, you press Shift Command and the number 4, and then you drag your icon to capture your photo. Then I go back to my morning meeting and I just go, I drag it in, or I can insert and do an image insert that way. So now it's time for me to add my photos. So I pick which words I'm gonna use that start with the letter K, like kick, koala, etc. And then I go back to YouTube and I search for the photos that I want to add into my slide. Now I double tap my keyboard and I copy the image, and then I just press Command+V and that will paste it right in to my Google Slide. Now, Kick I like to do action— actions that show the students, so I will go to Giphy. So I'm gonna look for an image that I think would help my students visualize the word kick, and I like this one. So over here I'm gonna click share, and I'm gonna copy the GIF link. Then I'm gonna go back to my morning slides, and I'm going to click Insert, Image, From URL, and then just paste that in, and then it pops up and it says Insert Image. So then I just resize that, and there it is. Now I do the same thing for my number of the week and my core words of the week. All right, so I want to show you my instructional time saver, and that is adding a hyperlink into your images so that you can just quickly click on the image and then the link will pop up to the video or the website that you want to go to. And because I was resetting my letter of the week, this is the perfect time to show you that. So I need something to go along with the letter K. I love to use starfall.com and I go over to Kindergarten and the ABCs. I take this link here and I copy this link. I go back to my slides. I make sure that the letter is selected, the image that I want to add the link to is selected, and then right here is your link, your hyperlink icon. So you're going to click on that and then paste the link into there. And now your picture is hyperlinked, and all you have to do is click and it takes you directly to the website. For more special education classroom tips and tricks, like and follow The Autism Helper on YouTube and check out our website at theautismhelper.com.
