Our students in the Idea Hive are currently working on collaborative presentations. This means that groups have been formed with some kids from Snow Lake and some from Wingham in each. The trouble has been working between the research space and the presentation space. Google docs has chatrooms that we use all of the time. Our kids are well experienced in chatting through a learning sequence, working out group roles and solving problems that way. Unfortunately, google presentations has never had a simple chatroom to work in while you are doing the actual editing of a presentation. You could chat while the presentation is being presented, but not while planning. This was causing us some difficulties as kids jumped back and forth between different spaces.
That has now changed.
An update to google docs has changed this so a chatroom (and other new presentation options as well) now exists. But the chatroom and new options only exists if you update your document settings. A few steps to this.
Step One:
Step Two (and three)
and that’s all there is to it. This will give you a chatroom in presentation editor mode – but only on new presentations that are created after you update your settings. It will also give you more editing options for the presentations themselves. One more step up for this tool.
Thanks to the students from Wingham who discovered this today and passed it along to their teachers…
And once again, I can hear our students’ sayin’, “We’ve got Skillz.”