Lecturing with google Slides (Post 3: academia and chromebooks)

I'm sorry for the delay in the next instalment for my series on science and academic uses of google chromebooks. A close friend of mine passed away, and that's taken up most of my thought processes for the last week or so. Thank you very much for the response to the last post on google docs and paperpile, it was great to hear from a bunch of you via the comments, google+, and the chromeos sub-reddit. In particular, I'd like to thank the person who pointed me towards GetDataJoy as a method of coding in Python on the chromebook. I'll be doing a full write-up of that in the future. However, today's post is fairly simple and will discuss the use of google Slides for lecturing in the class room.

Preparing lectures

If you are familiar with Powerpoint and the many derivatives, then there's not really a whole lot to say about google Slides. It is simple to use for creating clean slides, with enough animations and transitions to keep the audience happy/pissed-off. I used to be an OpenOffice Impress user for all my lecturing and conference presentations, but I have been converted to google Slides for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there are helpful guides for placement of objects when you are arranging the slides. These are simple red lines which, intelligently, appear when you drag or re-size an object and let you know if you are centred or aligned with the other objects on the page.

Secondly, things just look better than compared with OpenOffice. I don't know if this is just because it's new, but I genuinely believe that the fonts and shapes are rendered better in Slides. The available transitions look great when used in moderation, although I tend to only use the 'cube' transition for section changes and leave transitions turned off for every other slide.

Thirdly, and this isn't something that I use particularly often, but I like the ability to turn up at a lecture theatre empty handed, safe in the knowledge that I can use the browser on the theatre's computer to give me my slides. Should I suffer a catastrophic loss of my laptop and/or chromebook, then this will be very useful in the future!

Student feedback and collaboration

A theme that runs through my love of using google chromebooks for my academic life is the ability to collaborate with other users. When it comes to lectures, this acts more as a feedback channel for students. Students, who opt-in, are given sharing access to my lecture slides and are then allowed to view the content in their own time.

Figure 1. For better or worse, students can add comments

If they have any questions about specific slides, they can leave comments on the side bar. At the next lecture, I am able to pull up the previous lecture's slides and work through any comments that have been left before continuing with the material. These comments also serve to help me improve the lectures for the next year's cohort. Let's call it formative assessment of my lecturing.

I am currently working on a series of lectures with another colleague, and by using Slides, we are able to directly work on the material together. This allows us to focus on what parts of the course we are giving to the students, and lowers the risk of missing parts out because we thought the other person had it covered.

Figure 2: Planning content for the students to suit all parties

Keeping the screen turned on!

During the first lecture which I presented with my chromebook, I came across a really annoying feature: chromebooks don't have an in-built feature to keep the screen on, nor do they have the ability to change the amount of time it would allow before turning off the screen. I would spend 10-15 minutes lecturing via Slides before heading over to the whiteboard to expand on an item, or work through an example. I'd get half way through the example and the chromebook would be in sleep mode, turning off the HDMI output and all. It would then take a small amount of time to come back to full working mode. Our University uses eduroam for WiFi and this is the main slow point when working on the cloud (and is currently causing me annoyance by dropping out while typing this!).

Figure 3: Keep awake button on
the button bar.

I found, through an internet search, that I was not alone in feeling this annoyance. I found a plug-in for chrome which has three settings: Default, Screen Always On, and Never Sleep. I would advise that people who want to use their chromebook to install this plug-in immediately. However, don't do as I did and leave it on "Never Sleep" when they put their chromebook back in their bag for travelling home. That didn't end well. 

Always leave them wanting more

As ever, there are things missing from Slides that I'd expect from a presentation package. Particularly, I would love to have a proper slide organiser viewpoint. Currently, slides are presented down the left hand side of the screen and are able to be organised here. This gets pretty awkward with 20+ slides that need to be re-arranged.

After writing about how much I loved Paperpile, I would love for paperpile to be available for Slides. However, this would require Slides to have Add-On's in the same way that Docs does. I find it strange that they haven't made Slides as extensible as Docs in this respect. 

Until next time

That's about all I want to say at the moment about Slides. It's a fairly basic, but very useful, addition to the google Office environment. I think I'll write about GetDataJoy in my next article, but I am open to suggestions. 

Oh! Before I go, does anyone else notice their chromebook gets really sluggish if they don't restart it after 2-3 days, crashing individual tabs, and ultimately freezing? I thought that a selling point of a chromebook was that it wouldn't do this. I'm currently using an Acer CB3-111, and trying to work out if it is on its way out and I need an upgrade (my model only has 2GB RAM), or if this is a problem that will be persistent.