How to Create Drag and Drop Activities on Google Slides | EDTech Made Easy Tutorial

hello there and welcome back to my channel if you are new here my name is Michelle furry and I am a fourth grade teacher in Maryland if you have been following me really for any period of time then you probably know that I love to make technology related videos a lot of how to's and tutorials and tips and tricks but for today's video I wanted to really focus on drag and drop activities in Google slides I love drag and drop activities because they can be used for so many different things and it's so many different subject areas so I'm actually going to show you all three different ways that you can use drag and drop activities in Google slides so let's jump into it so the first type of drag and drop activity you can create is a labeling activity this is where you have some sort of diagram that you want students to label the parts of using little text boxes so right now I just have a blank Google slides document open I'm going to go ahead and X out of the themes because I don't need that typically I resize my slides you all know I love resizing my slides I love to make them either portrait size or landscape instead of presentation however for drag and drop activities I actually like to leave it in this presentation format where it's a little bit wider than normal because it just gives me more area to be able to put pieces on there that my students are going to manipulate I am however going to delete the text boxes I like to just have a clean start when I begin designing any kind of activity for my students now before I begin actually designing this drag and drop assignment I do need to decide what do I want my students to be able to move and what do I not want them to be able to move we are actually going to lock down the pieces that I don't want my students to move while leaving the pieces I do want them to move unlock so they can manipulate them around for an example I'm just gonna use like a map of the United States and maybe they have to label the seat just as an easy example I do not want them to be able to move the map around right like I want that to be stationary I also want the directions to be stationary I don't want them to move those so I'm actually going to put those onto my slide first let's go ahead and find a map of the United States I'm literally just gonna open up Google I'm going to go to Google and then I'm going to search us a state outline and I'm going to go to images this first one looks pretty good so I'm going to go ahead and just right-click and copy the image and I'm gonna come over to my presentation right click and paste it in there now because I need room for my directions and then ultimately the pieces are going to move around I can shrink this to help I don't need a quite that big I also don't need it quite that small so let's make it a little bit bigger maybe like that and I'm going to move it toward the bottom so maybe I can use this top area for directions and then on this side is where I can put all of the states that I want them to move around so let's go ahead and add in our title I'm just gonna add a basic text box and it's going to say label the states and I can go ahead and change the font I really like century gothic although if this is my title I really like oswalt it's a little bit of a thicker font I can make this larger let's go to like 36 you can either use the plus and minus or you can just type in the size I do want to Center this that's looking pretty good now I need to add in my direction so I'm actually going to make this text box a little bit longer I'm going to go ahead and enter but I'm going to change my font to century gothic and let's go with size like 18 so we're going to tell them to drag a monocots drag the state names on the left to the correct state location on the map pretty basic obviously I can fancy this up I can add color I can add in images and things but I just want to show you all the basics of how this works so I already mentioned that I do not want these pieces to be able to be moved around by my students so in order to lock them down on my slides I'm using air quotes because I'm technically not locking them like there is not a lock function in Google slides I know that exists in like Smart Notebook but that's not the case in Google slides at least right now so instead I'm going to actually save this slide as a PNG or a JPEG image and I'm going to insert it as the background that will prevent students from being able to manipulate it so I'm gonna come to file download and let's go ahead and do a PNG image it's going to download it right there personally when I create assignments like this I like to keep the original slides and then I like to create new ones so that if I have a typo or something I can go back to the original slides fix it redownload the jpg and then insert that in my new set of slides but for the sake of this video I'm just gonna go ahead and delete what's on this slide and start over kind of with a blank one so I'm going to go to background choose image and then I'm going to upload it from my downloads yes I have selfies so that is it right there open all right so now it has added it as the background I often times get questions from people about how I make it seem not blurry because if I go into present you will notice that it's just a little bit blurry it's not a huge deal but you can tell it's not quite as crisp I will say if you care that much if you create the backgrounds in PowerPoint and export them they tend to be clearer then through Google slides but personally I feel like it's just not that important so I'm not gonna worry about it now I want to add on top the text boxes that my students are going to drag on top of the map so I'm gonna go ahead and insert a text box I'm just going to start typing state names let's do text this now before I copy and paste this to create new ones I'm gonna go ahead and format this one exactly the way I want it so we're gonna do century gothic we're gonna have to keep the font size pretty small with these state names I am going to Center it I'm gonna make a little bit smaller I'm gonna make the fill yellow that way it really gets my students attention that hey this is the box you're going to move and then I'm going to add like a black border maybe make it a little bit thicker okay so now I've got that one actually I need to Center going up and down because I can tell it's not okay now I'm ready to copy and paste that so I'm just going to copy that text box paste it and now I can type another one so I'll keep it right underneath so for example Maryland I can paste again okay now let's do California hey scoop nope not inside the text box paste again and let's do ah it's not centered there we go Alaska and so on you get the point I'm not gonna go through and do all 50 states probably because I would struggle to remember all of them on the spot but just to show you how this would work for students now that this is all set up you will notice they cannot move any of these background pieces they are set in stone but they can take the text box and move it in order to label the states this is great like I said for diagrams or even labeling Maps even labeling like geometry terms in math like I'm thinking types of triangles which I'm going to use this in another example but you can have different triangles and have them label them based on the type of triangle that it is so labeling this is super easy one because it's basically just text boxes that they are going to move around and before we move on to the next one I just want to make sure you all realize when students do a drag-and-drop activity they cannot be in present mode so present mode is when it brings it in to a full screen you cannot move pieces around on preset mode so they actually want to stay in the normal slides when they're moving those pieces around let's move on to the second type of drag-and-drop activity which are charts or organizers I'm going to go ahead and create a blank slide now organizers and charts are great because they can be used in so many different ways you can have almost like a Venn diagram or a circle map or just a chart with different sections and they have to organize and categorize things it's so so easy in order to do organizers of any kind with drag-and-drop so just like before I want to ask myself what do I want my students to move and what do I not want them to move for this example I'm gonna do types of triangles just because that's what we just finished up in math maybe I want my students to organize them by acute triangles obtuse triangles and right triangles so based on the angles I'm gonna go ahead and make that organizer because I don't want them to be able to move that so I'm going to insert a table and I need it to have three columns I want one row for the title and then another row for them to actually put the triangles so I'm going to do a three by two I'm gonna leave a little bit of space at the top for directions I can resize this over let's go ahead and get the outline so I want black maybe for point and I want this bottom section to be a lot bigger because this is where they're gonna actually move the triangles so up here I'm going to give it a heading so I'm gonna maybe make it black century gothic it's to size 24 Center it and I want the font to be white so maybe this is where I put acute triangles obtuse triangles right triangles I'm gonna go ahead and bold those and I do want to add in a title just like before so I'm going to add that up here it had only a title I'm just gonna put directions I'm going to say categorize the triangles based on their angles drag the triangles at the bottom into the correct column I can go ahead and resize this I'm going to make that bigger Center it century gothic okay perfect this is it for what I don't want my students to be able to manipulate so I'm going to again save it as a PNG image and insert it as the background so in order to do that I go to file download and PNG image it's going to save it I can go ahead and delete what I have on here I'm going to go to background choose image browse and then I'm going to select it from my downloads click that and that is now inserting it as my background so again students are not able to move those pieces now I want to start adding my actual triangles those are what my students are going to manipulate in this case or dragged into the columns keep in mind or something like this it could be text boxes that they move into the columns or it could be actual images that they are moving into the column so you can totally adapt this to fit different subject areas I'm going to go to the shape tool I'm going to go to some triangle so I'm going to just start drawing some so there would be a nice acute triangle let's do another one like that but we're gonna spread it out so becomes an obtuse triangle okay yeah let's go ahead and add a bright triangle and like that and if I want I can swing these around different ways like I can make this one go like that and maybe put that one over here another acute triangle make this one tall maybe turn it on its side like that and maybe flip this one cool let's do another right triangle and maybe this one over here okay you get the point so I would just keep adding the triangles and once again students are not able to move the directions or the chart but they can move the triangles into the correct categories something I want to mention on this sometimes you don't have a lot of room to be able to put the pieces that you want them to categorize you can actually put them on the side of the slide so meaning not on the slide but to the side of it so just to show you I can take the triangles and I could actually move them over here on the side however I will say sometimes that can get frustrating for students because when they try to scroll to the side it will move them up a side or down the side if they scroll too far it can get frustrating so personally when all possible I like to keep it and just all on the slide just because it's easier for students to manipulate but if needed you could totally put them onto the side the last type of drag-and-drop activity I wanted to show you all is with movable pieces and I know what you're thinking you're like Michelle these all had moveable pieces but when I say movable pieces I'm more so mean like manipulatives or numbers that students are doing to either show their work or demonstrate their strategy so I'm gonna go ahead and add another blank slide and once again I want to first add anything I don't want my students to move I'm going to actually show this to you with both ways with moving numbers and with moving manipulatives so I'm going to go ahead and add my directions up at the top it's going to say move the yellow numbers to make each comparison true then use the base 10 blocks to model your comparison and provide evidence to support your thinking okay I'm going to go ahead and edit the fault like I always do century gothic let's go size 18 for directions and center it both ways I don't want them to move the directions I'm kind of envisioning over here on this side is where I'm gonna put the numbers and maybe the base 10 blocks but I don't want to put those on there yet because I want them to be able to move those so let's go ahead and put the actual problems I'm just gonna do two for an example so let's say you're comparing decimal zero point four three less then blank decimal link like also I know you would read this 4,300 I'm just saying to as I'm typing it so that's where they're gonna actually move the numbers let's make this bigger let's go like 24 I want it to be nice and big okay that works century gothic cool beans I want to leave some space for them to actually show their work so I'm gonna come down let's go to number two actually just copy this part paste it and change this and this time let's do by six so I have two pieces that I don't want them to be able to move let's go ahead and download this as a PNG I'm going to delete this and I'm going to insert it as the background now I'm ready to add in the movable pieces for my students I mentioned that I want them to move numbers on to the decimals so I'm going to create a text box for each number and I'm gonna put start with zero once again I'm going to put my font make it bigger let's also go size 24 Center it Center it let's fill it in yellow and make an outline in black now before I copy this I do want to check and make sure it's going to fit nicely on that line which yes it looks like it will fit perfectly there because there's nothing more frustrating than giving the student a line but then the piece are supposed to put there because your students will get frustrated and then you will get frustrated and nobody wants that's hell I've got my zero let's go ahead and copy this to create the other numbers and now we can actually copy I only need four for the next line because I can only go up to nine so make that there we have six seven eight and oh well I did not do that right then hold on I gotta fix this this is not acceptable okay that's what I want move the five down here oh my brain so now I have my numbers but I'm going to show you all a really neat trick obviously my students might want to use a number more than once like they might do for the first decimal 77 hundredths so in order to create duplicates of these so my students can use them multiple times I'm going to drag across and select all of the numbers I'm going to copy them all and paste them all but I'm going to put them right on top of where they just were and I'm going to go ahead and do that a couple times let's see there's six lines so at most they could use in number six times so now it looks like there's only one of each number there but I will show you if I move this nine and I put it here then there is still a nine there so as they drag them there will still be more of them underneath which is really cool so I have the numbers that they're going to click-and-drag but now I need to add in the actual like base ten blocks because I want them to model their thinking so I'm gonna go ahead here I'm going to do a 10-block hopefully it knows what I mean by that okay I'm gonna use this and I'm gonna show you I'm going to actually use just this one I'm going to crop it so I'm going to first get the one block so I'm gonna crop out where it says equals one crop it that way alright so there's my one block oh I did it a little off on this okay hold on I can fix this set better yeah that's better all right I'm going to put that over here and then I'm going to paste that same image but this time I'm going to crop to the ten and in case you're wondering why I'm using base ten plugs with decimals because you can use base ten blocks in order to model with decimals they basically become decimal grades so I'm going to go ahead and have the hundred because they might have a hole and that's good all right so I put these over here and just like before I want to create multiple of them so I'm going to click and drag to select all three copy and paste and move it right on top of where I had the previous one so I'm just going to repeat that process multiple times so that they can use the blocks multiple times and so now my students would easily be able to drag over the base ten blocks obviously I didn't lay this out the best way because they're not gonna be able to fit this underneath but they could totally resize it and move it where they want to in order to model the decimals one last thing I wanted to mention to you all if you are using these types of activities with your students especially through distance learning but even in the classroom make sure you teach them how to use the undo button because it will be their best friend even by locking in those background images that you don't want them to manipulate they will still find ways to mess it up okay they will delete slides they will insert slides they will delete pieces that they needed to move so teach them how to use the undo button or how to view the Edit history in Google slides so they can always go back and restore a previous version if they need to but that is it I really hope this video was helpful for you if it was please give it a thumbs up share it out with your teacher friends and I would love to know what other technology tips you would like to see from me so please leave a comment down below to let me know hit that subscribe button so you miss any future videos and the no vacation Mel okay and as always thank you for watching I love you all so much don't forget to put your paws and pants on and I'll catch you in next slide [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Pocketful of Primary

Views: 708,418

Rating: 4.9644485 out of 5

Keywords: teacher, classroom, vlog, 4th grade, pocketful of primary, tips for new teachers, tips for teachers, new teacher tips, teacher tips, classroom vlog, vlogger, teacher vlog, teacher vlogger, classroom tour, teacherspayteachers, teachers pay teachers, educational technology

Id: -byn2YTVeWU

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 07 2020