This Technology Tip Will Keep You SUPER Organized!
Whether you are a classroom teacher with your own classroom, or whether you are a traveling teacher who teaches in multiple rooms, this technology hack will save you a TON of time and keep you super organized. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I am a huge proponent of creating systems that keep me organized, efficient, and that save me time and mental bandwidth. In this blog post, I’m going to share this easy hack and walk you through the simple steps that you can take TODAY to incorporate this system into your daily teaching practice.
Drumroll, please… And the teaching hack is…!
DAILY SLIDES!! That’s right! Using Daily Slides consists of creating one slideshow presentation for each of your classes that you will use throughout the marking period to keep yourself and your students organized. Your Daily Slides should be unique to your teaching situation, but I have a few suggestions to get you started, and I will share some of my own Daily Slides so you can see how I set mine up. But before that, let’s talk about how daily slides work (practically speaking), and why they’re important.
How do Daily Slides work? Your Daily Slides will be a repository for all of the resources and materials you will need to access during each lesson. Your slides might include your Do-Now, the Lesson Agenda, and any other slides that will help you teach your lesson.
Why are Daily Slides effective? I love having every piece of digital material that I need for today’s lesson at my disposal. I don’t need to waste precious class time searching for files and documents in my Google Drive; I don’t need to spend time logging in to Quizziz, Kahoot, Gimkit, or Blooket and finding the particular quiz set that I want my students to work on; I don’t need to hunt for classroom tools like timers, spin wheels, or specific Youtube videos to show my students. All of these materials are pre-loaded into my Daily Slides in order to streamline instruction, minimize disruptions, and reduce teacher (and student!) frustration.
What do Daily Slides look like, and how do I get started?
Your Daily Slides should be personalized to best suit your needs as well as the needs of your students. First, you’ll want to create a Google Slides presentation for each of your different preps. I am currently teaching two levels of French, so I have two different sets of slideshows. You’ll also want to figure out how many slides you’ll want to include in each Google Slides presentation - you certainly don’t want to include an entire year’s worth of slides in a single document, as it’ll be too large a file and take forever to load. I break up my slides into four Google Slides presentations - I use one per marking period. So for example, your Google Slides might look something like this:
Spanish 1 MP1 Daily Slides, Spanish 1 MP2 Daily Slides, Spanish 1 MP3 Daily Slides, Spanish 1 MP4 Daily Slides
Spanish 2 MP1 Daily Slides, Spanish 2 MP2 Daily Slides, Spanish 2 MP3 Daily Slides, Spanish 2 MP4 Daily Slides
Spanish 3 MP1 Daily Slides, Spanish 3 MP2 Daily Slides, Spanish 3 MP3 Daily Slides, Spanish 3 MP4 Daily Slides
I start off my Daily Slides with my Bellringer/Do-Now activity, which is a slide that contains a quick activity for students to work on as soon as they enter my room. By having my Do-Now slide in my Daily Slides, I am able to enter my room, turn on my computer and projector, and have my Do-Now posted in under a minute. I never need to spend time looking for files, because my files are already organized.
My Daily Slides contain my Do-Now for each lesson, so students have something to work on at the start of class while I take attendance, catch up students who may have been absent, etc.
After my Bellringer activity, I include a Daily Agenda slide that lists all the activities we will be working on during class that day. The agenda gets created based on my lesson plan for the day, and I make sure to hyperlink any document or resource I will need at that particular point in the lesson. In the sample below, you’ll see we are starting class with a whole-class review of comprehension questions that students have already completed. I link to the Google Doc containing these questions, so all I have to do is click on this link, and I’ll instantly be taken to the correct Google Doc so that my students and I can review the activity.
I also make sure to include a link to the homework assignment of the day for two reasons: 1) When students are working independently, I project this Agenda Slide so that they know what they are working on, they are able to stay on task, and they are able to see what their homework assignment for the day will be; 2) I end up posting the Daily Agenda to Google Classroom so that all students know what we did in class and what the homework assignment is. (Note: This has been a COMPLETE and TOTAL game changer for me… now, students who were present AND my absent students know exactly what we did in class, and even parents who are a part of my Google Classroom can see what we have been working on in class.)
Tips & Tricks
Make sure your Daily Slides (Google Slides presentation) is organized in a convenient and obvious location. For example, if you teach an Italian 3 course, I recommend having a folder in your Google Drive for all of your Italian 3 resources. Your Daily Slides should be housed in this folder as well.
Add your Daily Slides to your bookmark toolbar. Simply drag & drop your Google Slides URL to your Bookmark Toolbar. This makes it SO easy for you to access your Daily Slides. I am able to start my computer, open Google Chrome, click on my Daily Slides bookmark, Present my Google Slides, turn on my projector, and freeze the screen in under a minute. So whether you have your own classroom or have to share with other teachers, this hack will save you SO much time and cut back on a tremendous amount of paper.
Collaborate with your team teachers! This is a great way to share the amount of work you have to do. If you explain to your team teacher(s) what Daily Slides are and how useful they will be—or simply share this blog post with them so they can learn for themselves!—your team teacher(s) will most likely be more than happy to collaborate with you in the creation and upkeep of the daily slides, especially if you teach the same content on the same days!
I keep a “rolling list” of my slides. I’ll have my Monday slides, then my Tuesday slides, then my Wednesday slides, etc. When I am done with my Monday slides, I highlight them (you can click on each slide and press SHIFT to highlight multiple slides). I will then RIGHT CLICK and select “Move Slide to End.” This will send those slides to the end of the Google Slides presentation so that my Tuesday slides are at the top of the list and ready to be used on Tuesday.
Do you use Daily Slides? If so, how do you set yours up? Let me know in the comment section below! And if you don’t, I truly hope that this blog post has equipped you with a tool that will help you to be more efficient and organized in your teaching. Daily slides have been an absolute game changer for me, and I’ve shared the practice with my team teacher who now also uses daily slides to keep herself organized. And the best thing about the daily slides is that you can use them year after year and just tweak them to align with the needs of your current students. My prep time is always super minimal thanks to my daily slides!
Happy teaching,
~ Michael
