In this week’s episode, I will be talking about annotations in Google Slides.

Find show notes & a full transcript at https://bit.ly/OneFive42 

SHOW NOTES:

Tricia’s Website: http://www.tricialouis.com/ 

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hello and welcome to episode number 42 of the one-five. I am your podcast hostess - Tricia Louis - the self-designated tech goddess and I will be coming to you weekly in this audio podcast format with great edtech tools, tips, and tricks.

In this week’s episode, I will be talking about the long awaited improvement to Google Slides - Annotation Tools during Presentation.

In this new improvement, when you goto slideshow mode in your google slidedeck, you can hover your mouse over the bottom left side of the window and click on the three-dot menu (or also known as the “snowman” menu). In that menu, you choose “turn on the pen”. Once that happens your cursor turns into a pen where you can annotate on the slidedeck. If that is too many steps to remember, you can always use the keyboard shortcut of Shift + L (using that same keyboard shortcut also toggles the pen off).

You can choose 4 different colors for your pen: red, black, blue, & green. There is an erase all option available, but not an eraser where you can just erase parts of your annotations.

The annotations stay on each slide while you are in slideshow mode, but they DO NOT save to your slidedeck when you go back to edit mode. I am hoping that they bring the pens in the edit mode as well - that would be superb for classroom use!

If you have some trouble with annotations, be sure you are using google chrome as it works best with the google suite of tools. Also very large slidedeck files may be kind of wonky when in annotation mode. And finally, if you are having trouble with annotations, clear your cache & cookies.

This feature is still slowly rolling out to all versions of Google Workspace (free & paid). As of the publication of this podcast, it was available in my institution account, but not in my personal google account.

This is a welcomed improvement to google slides and I hope more development is made for more pen mode editing/presenting for our slidedecks.

Do you want to learn more about edtech in your learning environment? Check out my website - tricialouis.com. There you can explore my resources, subscribe to my weekly email newsletter, and contact me. Don’t want to miss any episodes in the future? Go to your favorite podcast app, search for “The One-Five”  Podcast and subscribe! Feel free to review and rate and let me know what you think of this podcast! Keep in mind the information shared on this podcast may take additional clearances from your tech department to work properly in your district, school, or classroom. I have vetted all of the information shared on this podcast and it is available and/or correct on the date the podcast is originally published. But, remember that services, sites, or products can change or become unavailable without a lot of notice. Thanks for listening and join me next week for another episode of the one five!