Google Slides Template for Making Card Games

 

Here's a template I use when I create prototypes for my card games. It has 9 cards on each page, outlined in gray dotted lines. 

Click here to make a copy in your Google Drive.

I've used this method for years, from early stage prototypes to later versions. I've even sold some print-and-play games that I laid out completely in Google Slides. (Here's an example of a free version of one game I made completely in Google Slides.)

Here are some tips, all of which are just pointing out features of Google Slides that make it useful for layouts in general:

• Use Word Art for large letters or numbers, as shown on my example image. 
• If you use ctrl-c and ctrl-v to copy and paste a card or contents of a card, you can use the arrow keys to move it around. Each tap of an arrow key moves a selected object 1/12". Moving on a grid like that makes it easy to copy, paste and move objects over or down to the next card quickly, still keeping everything lined up.
• Use the shapes in Google Slides' shape menu as building blocks for more complex shapes. For quick prototypes, you'll be surprised how easy it is to make some functional images and icons to help with early playtesting.
• When you're done laying out the cards, you can just print them and cut them out. If you need to make them available to others, you can download the whole slideshow as a PDF. I've found some fonts will change size slightly and mess up the layout when you convert, so take a look at the file before sending it off to anyone. 

Contact me if you have questions about using this template. I'll update this post with more information as I get questions.

Inspiring Reading and Writing With an Authentic Audience - Part 3

In this third post about this project, I'll list some resources and focus on the final steps we go through to complete the digital products. I'll conclude with a bit about the challenges we faced to bring it together. If you want to read about the background, including why I think this lesson is so valuable, see Part 1 and Part 2.

 

The Planning Sheet

Once students were given the younger students' responses from the survey, we gave them a printed copy of this planning sheet. I added the planning sheet this year, since we had seen students struggle with it in the past. Here's a breakdown of the planning sheet:

• The first seven questions ask them to simply copy down what their assigned 5th grade student had submitted on their survey. That is meant to just ensure the writer read the younger student's information.
• The next few questions take them through the process of connecting those ideas (which are sometimes very unconnected) into a simple story. Some students had trouble with this, but I was impressed how imaginative they could get with just a little prompting.
• The last question asks them to outline the story. I assured them nothing was written in stone here, but it was important to make a plan.

I and the teacher worked with students individually to get through the outline process.

My plan was to have them start typing the story after the outline was done, but the teacher wanted a first draft to be written in their notebooks. I can see this group benefitted from that, so you can decide if a handwritten draft will be better than moving right to the digital part.

Making the Digital Booklets

I refer to these as digital books, but we just build them in Google Slides. I assign this template in Google Classroom, so that they each get a copy. It has two sections on each slide, so there's a place for text and a photo, like this.

Note that the first slide of the template has a place for a title page. I don't like them to take time making that at first, so the directions (typed on the slide itself) ask them to come back to that after they've completed a few slides. I provide these examples of cover images. Normally I encourage them to use Word Art, drop shadows and a good layout. See below about some challenges we faced this time around. Eye-catching title pages were not our main concern this year!

Preparing the Files

After students work through some drafts and revisions, they submit the stories in Google Classroom. I make a copy of each one and move the copies into a new folder in Google Drive. That way the teacher can grade the originals as normal, but I can polish up the copies so they're ready for the younger readers. 

The amount it takes to "polish them up" varies quite a bit from student to student. Most times it involves some punctuation corrections and some wording changes. Over the years I've had to rewrite some or nearly all of some stories for various reasons. For example, one time a younger student stated her problem as, "Sleeping through scary nightmares." The older student tried to provide a situation about overcoming fear that, even after her revisions, would have been too intense for the young student. I get input from both teachers involved, in some cases, just to be sure sensitive cases are handled appropriately.

I also rename the file so it includes the younger student's chosen nickname. That's so they can easily identify their story, depending on how they are given to the readers.

On that note, I prefer to download PDFs of each Slides presentation, then upload them to Drive. When I have a lot of time, I then build a Google Site and link to each story. This was not a year where I could do that in a timely manner, so I just sent the 5th grade teacher the link to my Google Drive folder with all the presentations. She shared that link with her class. 

Finished Examples

This first example is a very direct imagining of a situation based on what the younger student had stated in the survey. Here's what the 5th grader submitted

Here's the final story written by the 6th grader. I really appreciated this student's concern to include so many references to the younger student's responses in his simple story. 

The second example is one of the longer stories we received. There's a lot I like about this 6th grader's writing, but the detail overshadows some of the main theme of overcoming obstacles to achieve a goal. The writer's desire to address the younger student's responses is still very evident, though, and that's one of my favorite things about this project. Here are the 5th grader's responses:

And here is the finished story.

Conclusions

The additional scaffolds we provided (through question sheets) helped a lot this time around. The 5th grade teacher didn't know much about this project when I first asked if we could use her class as our audience. She was more and more impressed with it as we went along. She said her students loved getting the stories. It was a success in many ways, and I look forward to trying it again in the upcoming semester. 

I do want to address some challenges we faced in bringing it together this time. The project started as strong as ever, but a couple days into it we had several students out due to quarantines. Since every student had to write for a younger student, this activity really needs 100% involvement to come together well. For several days only half the writers were in class! Getting the ones to work on it diligently from home was a huge challenge. Even a couple students who were in class most days were resistant to writing. This was the first time some students did not care to write for younger students. We are sure this was due to the effect the absences were having on the students in general. All their classes throughout the day were impacted by it, so by our 6th period class, productivity was way down. The teacher and I almost decided to forget the project and try again next semester. 

It ended up taking several days longer than usual, so I was not in the classroom with them the final week or two. The teacher had students help each other to complete some stories. We never did get a workable story from those two tough cases. It was unfortunate, but given the situation, we focused on what we did accomplish. Two other students volunteered to write those missing stories. Their extra work and concern for the young readers was great to see!

Game Design Project in Mythology Class

Melinda Newcombe teaches the Mythology class at our high school. We teamed up earlier in the month as part of the Go Beyond Challenge I raised to myself and several teachers this school year.

In this overview, I'll link to a couple games that students made in this Mythology game design project. I'll also explain what we learned and give links to resources. 

Key Challenge to Remember:  The course content has to be the goal. If the students are thinking and talking about the content, it's a win no matter how the games turn out. 

We considered this project a big success in a lot of ways. It is a unique blend of content, game creation, collaboration and technology. Students and the teachers really enjoyed it throughout. I know from experience, though, that it can be overwhelming to take on the first time. This is not just a PDF download that you print and hand out. I'll list some tips at the end for anyone considering it.

My key takeaway: Working with this class convinced me this is a great project for a group of students who are interested in making a game. While it worked very well for us with a whole class, that brings a lot of obstacles you won't want to tackle until you've gone through the process a few times.

Overview

I put a lot of information about the game design project in general on my Game Design Project Packs site. Keep that link handy in case you want to use this someday. It provides a number of simple game options that the students can redesign based on the lesson content.  

We worked on the project for six class periods.

The overall process is:

• Learn to play what I call the "base games". These are games that will be new to almost all the students. They are easy to learn and they don't require a ton of printed materials. Don't underestimate how important those things are. It took a lot of work to find good games that fit that criteria. Since the games are not about the course content, I try to make sure the students learn them and play them in just one class period.
• Students then complete some planning sheets that help them think about how they will add a theme to the base games. This is vitally important, since it's when students apply the lesson content to the game. For example, if the base game uses chips as points, the planning sheet will ask them to think about what the chips represent from the lesson content. Here's the planning sheet we used for groups that redesigned Love Letter. 
• Next, students edit the templates I provide for the cards in the various games. All templates are in Google Slides, so the tech is not a huge obstacle. Students can easily do a superficial change, by just making the cards be about their lesson content. If time allows, though, you can dig deeper into game design here, asking them to make changes to the effects of cards and the rules of the game. (Templates are found on my Project Pack site. I'll add more soon.)
• When the templates are finished, it's time to print them, cut them out and see how well they work. Through playing them with other groups, students get a good review of the lesson material. It also lets them see the importance of testing and revision in game design (or any design for that matter). If there's time, you can repeat the previous step and this one, allowing them to improve the games.
• At the end, I have students do a reflection sheet that seals the learning. I ask about what they learned from the content, how they tied it into their games, and what they learned about game design. I also get feedback from them about the project itself, so I can do better next time.

Example Games Created by Students

Here are two different games students created as part of this project. They are two of the five different styles of games we offered. I made a few edits to clean up these files, but the majority of work was from students.

• Mythology Love Letter Retheme - A light strategy game based on Love Letter. This video shows how to play the original game. (Thanks for AEG for permission to use their Love Letter game in this project.)
• Take Your Pick Mythology Version - This is a party game I designed. It's published by SimplyFun. This video from the publisher shows how to play the original game. You'd need more cards to play for very long.

What We Did Differently This Time and What I Learned

As I said, this is the first time I worked with a large class and gave them the option of choosing from several games. I presented many options for them for the first day, as they learned the base games. Among all the groups, they chose to learn four different ones. 

Teaching that many new games to six or seven groups in 40 minutes (and giving them time to play) is a huge task. I've used games in class for 25 years, so I know how to teach them quickly and effectively. You'll make your life easier if you pick one game everyone has to redesign. 

Two of the base games I taught that day--including one that got the most repeated play--are not posted online yet. I will add them to the list on my Project Packs site soon. 

I will also add a section to my site for Mythology class projects specifically. There I'll post all the planning sheets, templates and reflection sheets we used. (The ones there now are generic, so teachers can adapt them to any subject or lesson.)

Two groups decided to branch out and make a game completely different from those I presented. What they proposed fit my criteria (not much to print, easy to learn, etc.), so I encouraged it. Remember that only had about 2.5 class periods to actually make the game content. You can probably guess what happened with both of these groups' game ideas. They had fun working on them, but they didn't get far in that little time. 

In fact, feedback from many students was that they needed more time. Students could stretch a project like this out for weeks, and if you're teaching game design you would need that long. All things considered, though, the teacher and I decided the goal was met and it was time to move on.

One big change I'd make was to focus more on learning standards as I met and planned this with the teacher. It was not a loss, but I could have done better in that area. The teacher told me she was really glad to hear the review taking place as students tested their games. There was conversation throughout about various myths and personalities. Once I read over everyone's reflections, though, I realized review was the most they got from it. With more planning, we could have achieved deeper learning goals.

Summary of Tips for Success:

• Keep content the goal. Remind students of that. Games might not work as intended. Art and fonts might look terrible. Many groups won't completely finish their game. If students were talking about and thinking about the content in new ways, your goal was achieved. 
• If students feel they don't have enough time or their game isn't going as planned, remind them they can always work on it as a personal project. Here are some posts that include a lot of tips for students who are interested in making games.
• These game design projects could fit in any subject, but they work best if you just finished a story or you've studied a historical period. Language Arts and Social Studies classes are easiest to start with.
• If you care about proper use of digital resources, provide a list of sites students can use for free images. I include that on their planning sheets. (See my Love Letter Planning Sheet as an example of sites I listed.)
• Let a motivated small group go through a Project Pack first, then decide if you want to try it with more groups or a whole class.
• Choose the game they will redesign, rather than just throwing several options at them.
• Contact me if you have questions. I can provide a lot more examples and resources than what I have here or on my other site.

Show Off the Learning With Digital Posters Using Google Slides

Do your students know how to use Google Slides to make an diagram or a message that shows what they learned? With just a few tricks, the popular presentation tool becomes an excellent, simple app for designing posters and other multimedia content. 

These work great in any class from 5th grade to 12th. Using digital tools, you can easily assign this as a project for remote learning.

This summer I made a full project about this that's available on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also made a short "preview version" that's available free. It has everything you and your students need to start with simple diagrams or message posters.

Click here to get your copy of the free preview lesson.

The preview has:

• A Teacher Guide that helps you decide what's needed in the project.
• Student directions that you can edit to fit any lesson.
• 8 short video tutorials embedded in the student directions right where they need them.
• Short video tutorials for you too!

If you like the preview, please consider getting the full version available for just $1.50 (for now) on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Improved Google Sites Headings Using Slides

Recently I saw a teacher ask online about better font options in Google Sites. Actually I have always appreciated the limited fonts in sites, so students don't get "lost in fontland" looking for the perfect one among hundreds.

However, if you do want to spice up your headings, the video below shows one way to do it.

The short explanation is:

• Design your headings using simple, attractive features in Google Slides. For example, Word Art, fill colors and drop shadows can really make your headings pop.
• Copy the image from Slides and paste it into your Site. Copying the image from Slides will be different depending on the computer you're using. I put some information below about both those cases.

Snipping an image from the screen using different computers.

• Windows Computer - As shown in my video, I recommend the Snipping Tool program.
• Mac - you can snip part of the screen by holding shift+command and then pressing 4. That will allow you to draw a box around it as I show in the video. It saves automatically to the desktop of your Mac. Since it saves instead of copying, you need to upload it to your Site instead of just pasting it in, just like you would any other image.
• Chromebook - The 6th key from the left in the top row of a Chromebook is needed for this shortcut. It's called the "show all windows" key. So if you press ctrl-shift-"show all windows", it will allow you to capture part of the screen much like what's shown in the video. You'll see a preview of the image appear in the lower right of the screen. Click the option to copy the image. 

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.

Classroom Game for Values and Opinions - Say Whaaat?!

I created this updated classroom version of my party game, Say Whaaat?!, using Google Slides. It's "the game of What matters most?" It allows one student (or the teacher) to draw five random words and the class tries to guess how he or she would rank those things in order of importance.

I and other teachers have used it for a fun icebreaker or to kick off lessons about goals and decision making. We've used it in meetings with adults too. There are many ways to play, including using it in online teaching situations (live or otherwise).

First, click here to get your copy of the Google Slides presentation for the game. Full Disclosure:  Please enjoy this version for free, but be aware it is a bit of a promotional tool. I put a link on the second slide to Amazon where you can order copies of the actual game. I license the game to a publisher and will receive royalties from actual sales.

This video shows the basic idea, but read below for all details, including suggestions for use in online teaching.

I'll explain other ways to play below, but here's the general idea.

• Don't actually click the Present button when you display the game slide (Slide 1) to the class. You have to be able to drag words around, so it can't be in Presentation Mode.
• Choose one student to be the Judge. Or you can be the Judge the first time if you like. The rest of your class or group will be trying to guess the Judge's priorities.
• The Judge draws five words from behind the Say What?! logo on the first slide. You can choose a word by grabbing one of the red "tabs" on the right of the logo. Each tab has a word (or words) connected to it. 
• After drawing out a word, the Judge drags it to a blank card space. At this time, order doesn't matter. Just start with the A card and repeat until all five cards have a word. See the example below of how this might look. Note: The Judge should not say anything about the words during this time.
• Now the rest of the students in the class will try to predict how the Judge will rank those five items from most to least important. They can just write their guesses on paper. For example, use the five words shown below. If you thought the player would rank Water as most important, you'd write C first. If you thought the second most important item would be Mail, you'd write B next. And so on. You might choose to have the Judge write his or her rankings as well at this time.

• When everyone has made their guesses, have the Judge explain how he or she would rank the words. It's fun if the Judges explain a little of the thinking that went into his or her rankings. 
• Players can keep score if they want, but it's just for fun and it's on their honor. They can count one point for every item they had in the same position as the Judge.
• To play a new round, delete the five words from the card spaces and then pick someone else to be the next Judge. Play as many rounds as you like.

Other Ways to Play

• The game can be played all at once or one round per day or week, etc. You can even assign the ranking portion as an assignment outside of class. Just have the Judge draw the five random words near the end of class. Have everyone write their rankings or guesses outside of class, possibly with a written rationale. They can come to class the next day ready to turn them in or discuss them.
• You can duplicate the first slide as many times as you like and pre-select the words in advance. For some lessons, it might be best to actually just type the words that best raise the discussion you want for the lesson. To type your own words, just draw out any word, then double click on the text box portion. It should highlight the word and allow you to type a new word in its place.
• You could use an online polling tool to have students submit their rankings. For example, I've done this with Google Forms. Each tool uses slightly different ways to set it up or different ways to enter their answers.The advantage is these tools allow you to show everyone how the class guessed.
• If you're working in a distance learning situation, you can combine a few of these ideas. You will probably want to select the words ahead of time as described above. Set up a as many slides with five words as you think you'll need. You could play live in a Zoom or Google Meet. Or you could download the slide as a JPEG image and just post it in Google Classroom. Students could submit their votes to you in a variety of ways or (if playing live) just record them on paper for fun.

A Note About Drawing Out the Words

There are a lot of words under that logo! If you keep using an unedited version of the Google Slide that I made, you might find you're always getting the same words in the initial rounds. That's because the words are in layers and you're always just pulling the words from the top layer. To solve this problem, draw several words out before you play and just delete them. That will ensure you're getting to the lower words in the stack. If you play multiple rounds and delete the words as they're used, this won't be such an issue.

Interested in Learning More?

I wrote a Designer Diary a couple years ago about the long history of this game. You can find it here on the Boardgame Geek website. 

Holiday Classroom Game and Creativity Activity

Here's a free resource that can be used for a few fun, creative activities in the classroom. At its heart, it's just a way to generate a random pair of words that students use to write a holiday themed haiku.

I'll list a few ways I've used similar activities in class, along with a brief explanation of each. Some will link to previous posts with more details.

First, click here to get your copy of the Google Slides presentation. It will open in your Google Drive.

Generating a Prompt
No matter which way you choose to use the activity, you will be generating a random prompt and students will use it to write a haiku. To generate the prompt, open the presentation so the class can see slide 2. Don't present it. Just display it as shown below. Draw two random words from behind the gift. You can grab them and drag them by the circle at the far right of the screen.

In the above example, the two words drawn are "gift" and "peace".

Students will then create a haiku using the two random words. You can require them to use the exact words, any variation (such as singular or plural) or maybe they just have to use the general idea of the word in their haiku. Of course, if you're using it for the holidays, that will be an implied general theme for all haikus they write. How generally or specifically you want to make this is up to you, but be sure to explain your requirements before they start any of the activities explained below.

Note that you can change the words too if you want. Just drag the words off to the side of the slide, so you can see the word. Double click on the word and it should let you delete the text and replace it with whatever you want. If it's a long word, you might have to stretch the text box to make it fit. Then drag the word back under the present, so it can be randomly selected during the activity.

A Class Writing Prompt
This is the easiest way to use the activity. The teacher can draw two random words from behind the gift. Every student in the class uses those two words (and any other requirements the teacher provides) to write their own haikus.

The writing can be done in class or as an assignment outside of class. Once the teacher has time to look at the submitted haikus, she can choose up to five of her favorites and type them on the A - E spaces  of that slide. At any time after that, the class can vote on their favorite using a poll/quiz application like Socrative or Kahoot, or they could just use a show of hands or submit a vote on a paper slip.

A "Game Show" With a Few Contestants
I used to do all my creativity games this way. It is a challenging exercise for the contestants, but if you have a creative group it can be fun. In this case, 3 - 5 contestants sit at the front of the class. The teacher draws two random words from behind the gift to form the prompt. The contestants each write a haiku using those words and the teacher's requirements. They should have 3 - 5 minutes to write it.

When they are finished, the haikus are read aloud and typed into the spaces A - E (or just summarized). The class votes on their favorite using a poll/quiz application or some other non-digital method. Each contestant gets points equal to the number of votes they receive. Points can be kept on the Score slide. Usually we have time for about three rounds when we do games like this.

If you don't want to give such a strict time limit, you could combine this format with the above activity. The contestants could write their haikus outside of class and turn them in the next day for the vote.

See this post for more details and tips for running these "game show" style creativity games.

A Game Played in Small Groups
More recently I started running these creativity games in small groups. In this case, you can do a sample round with the whole class, just so they see how to play. Then have them work in groups of 3 or 4 students. Each group will have one device to access their copy of the Holiday Haiku slide presentation.

They will play multiple rounds. Each round one student will be the judge. He or she will randomly draw out two words from behind the gift and show the other group members. Everyone other than the judge gets a limited amount of time to write a haiku that uses the two words and follows any other requirements the teacher has given.

When finished, the haikus are gathered and shuffled up. One student reads each of them to the judge. The judge chooses one as his or her favorite. The player who writes it gets a point.

Now the next player becomes the judge and another round is played. Rounds are repeated until each player has been the judge once. The player or players with the most points wins.

See this post for more details about playing creativity games in groups.

Reflection
No matter how I use these activities in class, I like to seal the learning by adding some reflection.  Here's the reflection sheet I used with one class after doing a similar small group version of a creativity game. Depending on how you presented the material and what the lesson content was, you will probably want to modify the questions somewhat.

Fun Holiday Tech Project With Google Slides

Students can use this process to make animated holiday cards for family members or just for fun. Everything can be created using Google Slides.

I'll give a brief overview of the process below. If you want to see my usual directions with video tutorials (not just for holiday animations), you can find everything you need to introduce it in class for $2 on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Here's a summary of the process:

1)  Make a Plan - Students really need to decide in advance what shapes they'll use and what's going to happen in the animation. Once they get going on later steps, it's hard to make a big change. In my example above, I knew I wanted the ornaments to float up on the tree and some words to appear.

2)  Create the Shapes - When you first use this process, it's easiest to make everything and have it be part of the first frame. Just start a new Google Slides presentation and start building.

I like to have students create their art using basic shapes in Google Slides (instead of looking for clip art online). In my example, I did use a graphic from Pixabay for the border. I created the other elements myself. Here's how my first frame looked*:

3)  Create the Animation - This is the heart of the process. You duplicate the current frame, then move the animated elements on that frame just slightly. To duplicate the frame, click on it in the left panel and (if you're on a Chromebook or PC) press ctrl-d. (You can also right click on it and select Duplicate slide.)

So in my example, I duplicated the first slide. Then on the second (new) slide I moved some of those ornaments on the floor up, just a centimeter or so.

You continue that process of duplicating the slide and moving the objects until all the animation is complete. As I said above, it's hard to fix a mistake once you get going with this. That's why a plan is important. Here are some other tips:

• I frequently click through the slides to preview my animation to make sure the objects are moving like I want them to. Sometimes they're not and I have to delete some frames to do a section over.
• Some frames should display a little longer, so I duplicate those a few times without changing anything. For example, I made several copies of the first frame, the last frame and that frame where the star lands on top of the tree. I wanted a pause at those points.
• You can animate text the same way. I made the text box, then had one word at a time appear. I've seen some people who like to have each letter appear one by one. It's up to you. When you do text, you especially will want to duplicate some frames multiple times to pause it at times. Otherwise the words go by too quickly. 

Click here to see all 40+ slides of my animation in slideshow format.

4)  Publish the Slides - You can publish the animation so it plays as a full page in a browser tab. Click here to see how this would look.

You can publish a presentation by going to the File menu and selecting Publish to the web. This window will open up. Check the boxes as shown, then click Publish.

That will make a link that appears as shown below. Copy that, as it says, by pressing ctrl-c. That's the link (more or less) that you need to share with others so they can see your animation. But don't share it yet! See the next step.

5)  Share the Link - You can paste that link in an email, add it to a website or share it any other way you like. Just remember one important thing. At the end of the link you'll see a 3000 when you paste it. Change that 3000 to a smaller number such as 100 or 150. 

I usually paste it into the address bar in a new tab and then change the number, so I can play the animation and see how it will look. You can keep doing this, adjusting the number how you want, with larger numbers making it play slower. Experiment with a number that works how you like it to. Once I've got a good number, I paste the link again, change the number, copy it again, then share that link.

6)  You can also turn it into an animated GIF! - I use the site Tall Tweets to do this. They have something called Tall Tweets Studio now, but I suggest scrolling down and clicking the Classic version. I also recommend teachers make copies of students' presentations and convert those for them, since there are some privacy and terms of service matters involved with granting access to Google Drive for this process. Since it has some other settings to experiment with, this option is only recommended for older students.

Again, the above 6 steps are a brief overview of the process. See my published lesson on Teachers Pay Teachers for a "ready to assign" document with everything students need. You'll want to show them my examples from this post, though, since the general directions are not just for holiday animations.

*Actually, if you want some behind the scenes info on my animation, I used a slightly different process. I worked backward to build my animation, because I wanted to start with the final image of the decorated tree. I did this just to be sure I had enough bulbs and that they'd look right. 

This is an advanced technique and I'd only recommend it to students who have made a few animations as described above. Besides thinking backwards, the only real change is that after duplicating a slide, I dragged it above the slide I just duplicated. So instead of duplicating slide 10 and moving the objects on frame 11, for example, I was always duplicating frame 1, then dragging the new frame up so it became frame 1. Then I moved the objects (in a backwards direction) on frame 1. This is harder to describe than it is to do, but I don't recommend it for beginners.