Sharing your virtual classrooms with students

A couple months ago posts like this one helped make virtual classrooms all the rage. Teachers in my district discovered these, loved them, but have also asked for ways to share the final result with students. I'll share my suggestions below.

If you're unfamiliar with virtual classrooms, they're basically a slide (Google Slides works great) that lets you direct students to different links. This tutorial is the one that a teacher pointed out to me first and it's very well done. The article I linked to above has more information and several examples too.

So once you've made a virtual classroom, what's the best way to get it to students? Personally I prefer to publish the slide. Here's an example of how that might look. I prefer this to downloading a PDF or linking to the presentation because:

• This will open faster for students using Chromebooks. If you've ever checked a lot of Google Slides presentations on a Chromebook, you know it can be tedious loading each one. Using this method avoids that problem.
• A single published slide will open much more quickly for students and links open in a new tab with just a single click. (PDFs are similar, but the links don't open in a new tab.)
• Once published, you can easily link to the slide from Google Classroom or any other learning management system you use. You also can embed it on your website. 

I made this short video showing how to publish a slide and get the link.

This video shows how to use the embed code to embed it on a Google Site. It's similar for other website creation tools.