I don't know what to do! What are we doing? There's an app for that!

How often do you see a student who is just kind of putzing around the room with seemingly no direction?  You ask them what they're doing and they say that they don't know what to do.  You just gave a GREAT mini-lesson, checked to make sure that they understood by having them repeat the steps and yet somehow between getting the assignment that they needed to do and their table they somehow forgot everything that you had just said.  That's not frustrating at all right?

There's an app for that!  A colleague of mine in fifth grade told me about how she uses Google Slides to give students their work for the day, links, etc. all in writing.  Well, 1st graders can't all read that well, so I decided that I was going to take her idea and modify it for first grade with pictures.  I literally call it our "What are we doing?" slides.  You can see what mine looks like here (it's all in Spanish).  When a kid is puttering around aimlessly or actually takes the initiative to ask me what we are supposed to be doing, I tell them to go right to our What are we doing slide for whatever time of day it is.  I change it every day as needed, but I still have a copy of my original slide show that I keep the original slides in so that I can always copy and paste the original slides back in to the current slide show at any time in case we have a strange week with a different schedule, etc.

I've put pictures of what they are supposed to do as much as I can to make it more universally-accessible.  To say that it has changed up how I do my day is an UNDERSTATEMENT.

What should we do in this center?  Boom! Check Google Slides.

What's our Seesaw login again?  Boom!  Check Google Slides.

The best part?  It lets me send kids links to work I want them to do really easily!  I have a Google Doc with a list of reading responses that I want them to do that they can pick from, and I just inserted the link into the Google Slide for my Responding to Reading slide.  I have students who were making bad decisions for their learning, so I have the link to a Google Form that I created that lets them reflect on their behavior and then I email their responses to their parents so that they can talk about it at home.  And I'm just scratching the surface!

What are some ways that you use Google Slides in your class?