September 2021 – Craig M Sheil

There are a couple of tools out there that help with creating brochures or infographics from pre-made templates. Sometimes, it might make sense to create a similar product in Google Slides. This could be because you might need the ease of collaboration. Sometimes it might be due to the fact that your district does not have a signed agreement with the edtech tool. Regardless of the issue, if you find yourself in a situation where you would like to use Google Slides, don’t assume students know how to use the tool beyond adding a slide, adding text in a textbox field, and grabbing pictures

Recently, our 9th grade humanities teachers wanted students to work collaboratively to create a brochure. Doesn’t really matter what the topic was as this could be adapted in any curriculum. What I wanted to focus on was helping make sure students knew how to be creative and manipulate their content to fit the brochure appropriately. Yes the information curated was important for the task at hand, but in my mind, it also needed to look visually appealing that someone would actually want to learn from.

Each year, Jess Gilcreast (librarian) and I get together to talk about how we are going to support our staff. We evaluate what we have done in the past and how we think we want to move forward. We know that each ‘student’ learns differently and keep that at the forefront when making decisions.

The first thing we wanted to tackle was how we were communication with staff this year. Staff receive too many emails. Staff don’t have a lot of time on their hands. Staff have too much information coming at them at once. So how do we get staff to want to learn/understand new things? It is one of the trickiest things for those of us in our positions.

Month: September 2021

Brochures in Google Slides

Communicating with Staff