Creating Student Tutorials with Published Google Slides Instead of Videos

Here's something I just started doing and I'd love to hear comments from other teachers who make a lot of tutorials.

Instead of making a video tutorial as usual for new lessons, I put all the steps in a Google Slide presentation and published it to the web.

Besides being examples of this process, I hope you find the tutorials themselves useful for tech projects in your class.

Here's the first example, about using Stop Motion Studio.
And here's a very useful one for importing photos using Google Slides on the iPad.

Why?

Why do tutorials as Slides instead of video? Well, generally I'd say this is much faster to create at first. Especially if a series of screenshots will do the trick, it should be faster than recording, editing out mistakes, adding callouts, etc.

Another plus is that I can update it almost immediately if I find out students need more information or if I have a mistake. All the students have to do is refresh the page and they'll see my changes.

I think students might like this better, since they can more easily quickly jump just to the parts they need as they work with the app the first time. If nothing else, it is a change of pace from the many videos from me that they normally have to watch.

I'll have more to say about their preferences after we try these with a class next month. I'm also going to try it with some staff tutorials.

The Reality So Far

I will point out a couple delays I had when making the first tutorial.

It did take a little while to make the animated GIF I used in the animation tutorial. Such GIFs often are not necessary, but sometimes a moving image conveys a lot of useful information. I still think the whole thing was faster than editing a video tutorial. (And by the way, I use this site to change most of my video clips to GIFs.)

More significantly, I ran into a very time consuming delay when I tried to insert the screenshots into the first tutorial. I actually used a process similar to what's shown in the second tutorial. I suspect the very large screenshots I grabbed from the iPad choked up my home WiFi, though, and the app gave up trying to sync them.

I did almost the same process for creating the second tutorial and I had no problems. I did go a little more slowly as I inserted each image on the slides.