Creating Simple Google Sites to Keep in Touch With Students

When schools were closed in Michigan some elementary teachers in my district wanted to keep in touch with students using a website. I made these two short videos to help them get started. They are meant for beginners. Also, please understand they were done quickly and are quite informal.

I'm happy to say they helped teachers create sites who had never made one before. I got some sincere thanks for the effort.

This first one shows how to start a Site and add text, images and links.

This second video shows how to publish the site the first time and how to find the link so others can view it. Note that you have to publish the site again each time you edit it.

Recording Audio and Adding It to Your Google Slides Presentation

It's a simple process to add audio to Google Slides presentations now. Students can use the feature for many things, including their narration on each slide. Here's a simple example I made to show how this might work.

While it's easy to add audio, there are at least three steps that students might need help with, especially when using Chromebooks. I made a document (at the link below) that will walk them through the process. It is intended to be useful for a variety of different classes and projects. 

Those three things they might need some help with (or reminders for) are:

• How can you easily record the audio for the slides?
• Don't forget you have to upload those audio files to Google Drive.
• And if you share the Slides presentation, you also have to share those audio files with the same people.

All of those details and more are addressed in this one-page document. Feel free to share that document with others and edit as you like. Please keep the link to my blog at the top.

These tutorials are linked within the document:

• A video tutorial for using Bear Audio Tool to record the files for each slide
• A video with tips for how to add the audio files and be sure they play how you want them to (including how to upload them to Drive)
• A brief explanation in the document of how to easily share the audio files so when someone presents them, they will play.

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.

My Updated Animation and Interactive Stories Projects

I updated two of my popular lessons recently:

• Simple Animations Using Google Slides
• Interactive Stories Using Google Slides

Students love both of these simple projects and the lessons come "ready to assign".

You'll get access to student directions in a Google Doc that you can simply post in Google Classroom. Students will follow the step by step instructions and watch video tutorials as they go. 

Both projects work well in any subject area for grades 5 - 12. The students will create their projects using Google Slides.

The lessons are $2 each on Teachers Pay Teachers, but you can buy both in a bundle for just $3. Here are the links.

• Simple Animations
• Interactive Stories
• The Bundle of both projects

Beyond Slideshows - Four Alternate Options to Show Off the Learning

In my job in a K - 12 district I am always looking for simple, quick ways for students to show what they've learned. We use Google Apps and Chromebooks in our classrooms.

Recently I updated some resources for our teachers and put everything on one website. I made a public version at the link below. All of the projects on it have shown up on this blog in one form or another, but I hope even my regular readers will find this single location helpful.

These projects range from easy enough for early elementary to something middle school students can create. All of them can also be extended to final products appropriate for high school students.

With each project on the site I include:

• At least one example of the final product
• A video tutorial of how to create it
• A document of directions that a teacher can edit and distribute to the class through Google Classroom - This document also includes links to the example(s) and the tutorial.
• Suggestions for extending the projects

Here's the link to the site. If you find it useful, please share it with others and let me know what you think of it.

A Simple, Powerful Reflection Activity with Google Drawings

For some recent professional development I have been focusing on thinking routines from The Visible Thinking website.  One particularly powerful reflection routine caught my attention, so I created a related template for it in Google Drawings.

The routine requires the learner to complete this statement and explain why:

I used to think _____, but now I think _____.

Of course, this comes best after the students have done something that would have changed their thinking. It could be a lecture, video, book, event or a significant passing of time.

As a tech activity, I made a Google Drawing template (which you can get at the link below). It uses two photos and brief text. Ideally students would edit the template to make it their own, then explain to the class (or other audience) why their thinking changed.

Here's an example I made based on a shift in thinking that happened for me after I left the math classroom to work in ed-tech.

Click here to get a copy of the Google Drawing template.

As this next image shows, students can change the text and replace the images easily. I have a few other tips listed below.

Other tips for this activity:

• There are many ways to get the images. Students can take them themselves or they can use the search feature. I include the word "Pixabay" when I search, so it will use the Pixabay site as a source. Images from there are free to use without attribution. 
• If students use images from other sources, they should be sure they are citing their sources properly.
• I made the text boxes a semi-transparent color to make text easier to read. With some background images you will have to experiment with text and fill colors and possibly font styles to be sure it can be read.
• Remind students this is meant to be a quick tech activity. The thinking that goes into the wording and the explanation of why thinking changed is far more important than getting the right images and fonts. 
• Download the Drawing as a JPEG or PNG file (in the File menu) if you want to post it in a blog, website or on social media.
• This is good reflection activity for teachers too!

A Quick, Simple Google Chrome Extension for Student Video Responses

Here's the most popular tool I showed at the miGoogle conference recently. It's a simple Chrome extension from Alice Keeler called Webcam Record. It records a short video clip from a webcam on a laptop or Chromebook, uploads it to Drive and automatically copies a link to it so you can paste it where you need it*.

So teachers can use this to give simple video directions and students can use it to share their thoughts back to the teacher. See it in action in the tutorial below.

You can get it in the Chrome Web Store here or have your G Suite admin push it out to users. I pushed it to all teachers and all students in grades 5 - 12.

*I do have two important things to watch for.

1. Unfortunately when we've tried to share the video using the link that's automatically copied it doesn't give the user access. I tried sharing the whole folder and it still didn't work. I showed students they can copy a shareable link just by right clicking on the video and clicking Get shareable link. It adds a few clicks to the process, but it's not bad. The tutorial below shows this workaround.
2. Every once in a while we used this on a new device, it didn't upload the first recording properly. I suggest you make a short test recording the first time you use it, just to be sure the file saves to Drive.

Here's a tutorial I made for the teachers and students in my district.

Authentic Audience and Authentic Engagement - Interactive Stories Using Free Google Apps

I already wrote a lot this summer about the most exciting, creative project I've been involved with in a long time. I worked with some students to create a story one short piece at a time. What made it amazing was we'd publish the story on the school website, then let the readers complete surveys to tell us what should happen in the next chapter.

This gives the students experience with writing for an engaged, authentic audience. Everyone involved was excited to find out what happens next in the story!

We told our story in comic form, using my favorite method of combining real life photos with comic elements. Of course, it will be much easier to create the stories if they're written as prose rather than comics. I'm calling them interactive stories and I will outline the process below. (There's even a 10-page ebook with tips at the link at the very end of this post.)

We actually ran into a snag in the middle of our comic project, so I resorted to some written chapters just to keep the story going. That gave me some experience with what I'm about to describe.

The Flow of the Project

• Explain the project to the students - This includes the very important aspect of telling them what course content you expect to see in the story. They need to know what they are supposed to learn from it.
• Write the first chapter - Students (the Storytellers) would begin by writing a short chapter to kick things off. It just has to be long enough to introduce some characters and make a cliffhanger that will hook the Readers. I suggest using Google Docs for this, since it's easy to share in a later step.
• Create a short survey - Using Google Forms, the Storytellers create a survey with three to five questions that will help them decide what happens next. We embed the link to the survey right in our story, so anyone who reads it can easily find it. See the link at the end of this post for lots of tips about making good surveys.
• Publish the story - We put a shareable link to our story on our school website. The Readers would find it there easily, read it and complete the survey.
• Make the next chapter - The real learning happens here! Combining the lesson goals, the Storytellers' ideas and the input from the Readers, the Storytellers have to plan and write the next chapter.

That process continues with another survey, publishing the new chapter, getting feedback and so on. As it comes to a conclusion (probably after several weeks) the Storytellers probably will request less and less feedback. 

If doing the story as a comic sounds even better (which I think it can be!) I created this ebook for the process using comics and it includes a ton of tips for getting started and working through the project. 

While it can be so much simpler to have students write the story in Google Docs, much of that ebook will till be helpful. The link below takes you to a free, shortened version that will help with these written stories.

Some tips specific to this written process are:

• Use a fairly large font with generous spacing. Dense text is not fun to read on a screen.
• Even with large fonts and spacing, try to keep the chapters to less than two pages. Your Readers might go for longer passages, but we found many wouldn't bother reading longer chapters.
• Make sure you set up Google Forms so the responses are not anonymous. This is very important if you ask for open ended comments. As the teacher, you might choose to manage the survey responses.

I summed up the Gathering Feedback section of my ebook into a much shorter PDF. You can find it here:

Getting and Using Reader Input for Interactive Writing Projects

If you do this project with a class, I'd love to hear about the results! Please send me an email and let me know how it goes. Include a link to the story too!

Scanning Text to a Google Doc for Editing

Here's a neat trick I didn't realize would be so simple! Note that this only works on Android phones right now and I use a computer or Chromebook for the second part.

While doing a virtual book study of What School Could Be, I needed to copy passages of text from the printed book. I accomplished this easily by using the Scan option in the Google Drive app.

It's all shown in the two-minute video below, but here are the main steps.

1. Open the Google Drive app on an Android phone.
2. Tap the + and pick Scan.
3. Take a picture of the printed text.
4. Retake it or crop it as necessary.
5. Click the + to add more pages.
6. Repeat steps 3 - 5 until you've scanned everything you need.
7. Tap the check mark. That will upload the scans to your Drive as a PDF.
8. Then on a computer, locate that PDF in your Drive.
9. Right click on it and select Open With Google Docs.
10. Make minor edits to the text if necessary.

I've found it works very well. I made this informal video for the teachers in our book study. Itshows the screens as I go through the above steps.

Our Collaborative Comic Story

Last fall I wrote about an interactive story experiment I started with some students a our middle school. They enjoyed our usual Google Slides comics assignment, so we decided to start an ongoing story based on input from the rest of the school.

We started the comic in September and worked on it regularly through October. Then classes changed and I got busy with other projects. It took a lot of effort to finish it, but I'm happy with the results.

You can read the complete story here. I added plenty of notes throughout, so you can get an idea of the work that went into it.

We ended up telling the story in a variety of ways, using photos, drawings and even prose.

Throughout the project I tried to faithfully incorporate ideas from the students who followed along and gave their feedback through Google Forms.



In the final weeks of school, I reunited with the girls who started it and we brought in the additional characters. We had one last photo session. It was a hectic end to the school year, but I managed to complete the final chapter and publish it on the very last day of school.

This would be an excellent addition to a Digital Media class. The skills involved went far beyond just familiarity with Google Slides.

As with any of the comic projects I've written about, you could publish the final product in a variety of ways.

Effective Integration of G Suite and Related Tools for Learning

Last month I presented at the MACUL conference about using G Suite apps and Chromebooks effectively according to the Triple E Framework. It was a culmination of many ideas I've used in trainings over the past two years. I was very pleased with the reception.

The main resource I shared in the session is this Google Docs table. In it, I list the nine key questions from the Triple E Framework and point out several ways in which apps like Docs, Slides and other tools can excel in each. I also list a few possible weak areas to watch for.

I hope to present on the same topic a few more times this year, so I'll be glad to hear suggestions for additions or ways I can improve it.

I also have the complete list of resources from that session here, though you will find many of those other resources on other pages in this blog.

Making a Choose Your Own Adventure Story with Google Slides

Update 6/26/2019:  I just posted an updated lesson plan for this on Teachers Pay Teachers for $2. It includes several improvements I made this past school year. My goal was to make a lesson you could assign in Google Classroom and the students wouldn't need any help from you to complete it.

As I mentioned last week, I'm teaching a class called Learning Through Gaming. In the survey I gave the class the first day, many students indicated they wanted to make games. To give them a taste of creating a game, I had them create a Choose Your Own Adventure story using Google Slides.

Here's a document based very closely on the directions we gave our students.

The document contains all directions and a link to this very basic sample story I made. I also included a link to Eric Curts' excellent example. (If you're not familiar with Eric's amazing site, Ctrl Alt Achieve, be sure to check it out. Like so many of his posts, he has the definitive guide on Choose Your Own Adventure stories for class.)

A few other things to note about this assignment:

• I put a video tutorial in the later stages of the document that shows how to create the links. 
• Students will probably want to get started on the links right away. As you'll see, I emphasize planning first.
• As Eric says on his blog, his story was written and illustrated by middle school students. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books many of us loved as children, the endings sometimes involve your death. Keep this in mind if assigning this to younger students.
• The example stories I link to are published to the web. That means they open in full screen. I didn't include directions for that for the students. In their case, they start the story by clicking the Present button in Google Slides. 
• Like many of our activities at the middle school level, I will be posting the students' stories on our school website. The school will vote on their favorites and the winning authors will get a prize.

Ongoing Comic Project for Everyone

Here's a exciting project we started this week.

I had assigned my usual comic projects in the middle school Computer class and a couple girls really got into the idea of making a story. So I suggested we make an ongoing story to post on our school page along with a survey to let everyone make suggestions on what happens next.

So comics, cliffhangers and everyone can play a part. How fun is that?

Here are the few pages we came up with to kick things off. I also made a short Google Form that asked for suggestions about what the girls should find in the storage room. I gave them a chance to vote for if the thing they find should surprise them right away or if it should take awhile.

We got several votes in the first couple days and the girls are planning the next part of the story. I look forward to seeing it play out over the next several weeks.

When the story is done, I'll post an update.

Updated Comic Activity with Google Slides

Last week I assigned my popular creative comic assignment to the middle school Computers class I've been working with. I posted about and shared a similar assignment earlier this year.

This time around it was just as engaging for the students. I decided to extend it with a second part that required them to take their own pictures for the comics.

Part 1 introduces students to the simple process of making comics using real life photos and Google Slides. They don't have to take pictures for this part.

Part 2 has students make an original comic from scratch using photos they take. We use iPads in our middle school and each iPad has it's own G Suite account associated with it. So the assignment directions refer to that.

You can find the full two-part assignment as a free download here from Teachers Pay Teachers. The PDF download links to the two parts as PDFs and as Google Docs, so you can edit them to fit your needs.

If this activity looks interesting, be sure to see my full ebook (only $1), Creating Comics with G Suite Apps. In it, I explain additional publishing options and I have several tips for making a successful comic project.

Three Presentations at miGoogle 2017

I'll be leading three sessions this year at the miGoogle conference. This is the Michigan Google Education Summit and it will be held at Fenton High School in Fenton, Michigan on November 8th and 9th. Be sure to check it out at this link if you are interested in attending.

As of this posting, they don't have the schedule complete. Here are the links to the sessions I'll be leading. (I'll add some previews and session resources to these documents as we get closer to the date.)

• Show Off the Learning with Google Drawings
• Show Off the Learning with Google Sites
• Recording and Publishing Google Slides Presentations

Hope to see you there!

Three Essential Tech Skills for Teachers with Chromebooks

I was at a small conference this week at our ISD. That means I spent a lot of time preparing sessions, presenting and chatting with colleagues. I realized I keep coming back to a few "essential skills for teachers", so I thought I'd compile my resources for them here.

These are not directed to teachers on the cutting edge of tech integration. They are for those many teachers who have Chromebooks, but mostly use them for research and managing assignments in Google Classroom. 

All of these appear on my blog somewhere else, but I'm combining them here along with some next steps or extended activities. And I added some essential reading at the end too.

Skill #1:  Getting photos and video from a phone or tablet into Google Drive

I'm still amazed at how many teachers don't use this. They (or their students) try to email files or even send them in text messages. If you can get a photo or video to Google Drive right on your phone, you have a bridge between the real world and your tech projects. From Drive, you (or the people you share them with) can open the images and videos on a Chromebook and use them in countless ways.

Here's my blog post and video tutorial about this. The video is just over a minute long, but I've seen this make a big difference for teachers.

Next Steps or Extended Activities

• Most apps have other ways of sharing out the files. I didn't include it in the tutorial because of all the possible variations, but experiment with it on your phone. Can you get the content from your favorite apps into Drive? If so, it offers great options for projects on the Chromebooks.
• The Google Slides and Docs apps on phones and tablets will allow you to insert the pictures directly into the document or slideshow. Imagine having a team working on the slides while another documents the activity by taking pictures. One teacher I showed this to last summer told me it's now a Day 1 activity for his middle school science classes.

Skill #2:  Making a PDF eBook Using Google Slides

PDFs can be viewed easily on any device. Teachers and students who can turn their slideshows into PDFs have a great opportunity for showing off the learning beyond the classroom. 

While it can take awhile to make attractive pages in Google Slides, the few clicks necessary to make a custom sized PDF only take about a minute. From there, the creation options for communicating to the world are endless.

Here is the blog post and tutorial for this. 

Next Steps or Extended Activities

• Mostly the next steps here are just to improve the design of your ebook. For example, more attractive images, better layouts, etc. This comes from exploring the different tools in Google Slides and learning about good design.
• I've helped very young students create presentations in Google Slides. Even in kindergarten we had success with it. Of course, you have to provide more structure in early grades. For example, in that project I built the slides and put clipart on each one. The students just moved the graphics around to design their pages. In third grade we made ebooks and gave the students more freedom. There I simply created a blank slideshow and changed the dimensions of the slides as shown in the tutorial above. Then I shared it to groups through Google Classroom and they added the content collaboratively.

Skill #3:  Making a Recorded Slideshow with Screencastify

I created this tutorial several months ago, but it was clear at the tech conference this week that many agree with me. Screencastify is the screen recording tool of choice for a Chromebook. I love how it records the screen and goes immediately to Google Drive.

In my district, I encourage all teachers and any student in grades 6 - 12 to use that tool along with Google Slides to make a "recorded slideshow". It's a good first step in screen recording that lets teachers communicate a lesson or other information. And students can use it to show what they've learned.

See my tutorial here for complete information on this important process.

And here is my free Tech Project Pack about the process. It contains information and resources to help teachers integrate it into any subject.

Next Steps or Extended Activities

• My tutorial is about recording a presentation as you click through the slides, but really you can record anything on the screen. You could introduce a website, a skill using a new tech tool or (by recording the camera) you can even capture live video. The paid version of Screencastify allows editing of the video to some extent and many other good tools are out there to make professional recordings. Camtasia is my favorite, but it is costly.
• Explore tab recording in Screencastify. It gives you more tools as you record.
• The same process can be used for digital storytelling. Imagine making the pages of a story in Google Slides, then recording it while telling the story and clicking through the pages. For young students, the whole story could be told with just a single slide or even a single photo.
• Students can also use Screencastify to record their explanation of a problem. For example, they might use Google Drawings to create a visualization of a math problem, then they could record themselves explaining their thinking. 

Required Reading for Every Teacher Who Uses Technology

Be sure to see my post from earlier this summer about Liz Kolb's Triple E Framework. It is the most practical, research based model I've seen for directing or evaluating effective use of tech in the classroom. As my post explains, her website contains a lot of valuable information, but her book is well worth reading. It's called Learning First, Technology Second.

So that's my current list of essentials. If you have questions or suggestions to add to the list, please add a comment below or send me an email.

How to Use the Google Drive App to Transfer Photos or Video from a Phone or Tablet

This is an essential skill for showing off the learning that takes only a few minutes to master, yet I regularly encounter teachers and students who can't do it. Take a minute to watch the video if you're still using USB cables or email (or worst of all, text messages) to get your files to a computer.

If you have photos or video on your phone (or you want to take some) to bring them into projects or share them with others, learn to use the Google Drive app. It's so easy!

It's the bridge from the real world to your projects. I've seen teachers get excited when they realize the possibilities this opens up for creative classroom projects.

This short video tutorial shows everything you need to know.

Resources for Sale

I'm taking some time this summer to update and upgrade some popular resources and put them on Teachers Pay Teachers.

First I added this free download about how to create recorded slideshows. I consider that to be an essential skill for teachers and students.

I also added the new version of my ebook about making comics with G Suite apps. That resource is based on my most popular conference session. It's a proven process that I've seen ignite a classroom as students discover the fun of creating. The normal price for the ebook is $4.00.

If you already have the free version I used to offer on this blog, you'll want to know I added a suggested rubric for the comics in the new edition. I also made some minor changes to the section about video projects.

If you have followed my work on my blog or elsewhere, I would greatly appreciate you at least downloading the free PDF about recorded slideshows and giving an honest review. That would help many other teachers discover them.

Show Off Any Project Using Google Sites

**A newer version of this post can be found by clicking here.

Regular readers and anyone in my training sessions has heard me repeat it. "Show off the learning!"

There are lots of ways to show our best work, but doing it online is certainly one of the best. In my district, many teachers assign a lot of real world products rather than digital ones. That's great, but when I talk about sharing work online, they feel they have no options (or they happily think they're off the hook!).

This week I created a short document and video tutorial to give them one easy way to show any product digitally. It makes use of the new Google Sites, which I absolutely love. 

Google Sites doesn't have a ton of options, which means students won't lose time finding just the right font and background image. 

So imagine students made a physical "something" in class. You could give the students these directions and they'd create a web page that shows pictures or video along with text, showing off what they made and learned. 

Here is the full video tutorial:

And here is the single page of steps that you'd give the students. Notice most of the steps link to the exact place in my video tutorial. That way they don't have watch everything if they're stuck on only one part.

Some things to note:

• You must tell them what you expect to see on the site. My steps and tutorial only show the how. It directs them to you for the what.
• Students would need to take pictures or video of their project, then upload those to Google Drive first. I didn't show that in this tutorial, but it's very easy if they have the Google Drive app at their phones. I consider this to be a survival skill in today's world. I'm working on making a good video to show this process.
• You'll see in the video that images don't always work like they should. I show a workaround if your students experience that problem.
• Some students forget to do the sharing step (labeled as #1 on my list). If that happens, you won't be able to see their pictures or video when you look at the site. 
• Step #7 is another common pitfall. Students often will send the link to their side of the website instead of the published version. It is clearly shown in the video, but they need to pay attention.
• I didn't address adding multiple pages in my steps, but it is very intuitive to add a new page. This could be great for organizing information about a larger project.
• Note that my final step tells them to turn it in through Classroom. If you use a different process, you'll need to modify that.

Creativity Game with Google Slides - Abe & Einstein

This post contains a link to the template you need to play this game, but you'll also want to see this post  which explains how to run these creativity games with your class using Google Apps.

My most popular posts on this blog are the creativity games and exercises. Over the past year I have been translating some of those ideas into a Google Slides format.

When played as a classroom game, this one allows 3 - 5 creative students to compete to make up what two random well known people would say if they met. For example, what would you overhear in a chance meeting between Spider-man and Santa Claus? How about Harry Potter and Justin Bieber?

The whole class participates by voting on their favorite response. The creative thinking required for this game can be a challenge, but I've seen middle school and high school students have a lot of fun with these games.

I also have suggestions at the end of this post for other ways to use the activity, possibly with less time or allowing more students to create the fun answers.

First, here's the flow of the game when used with the whole class. There is a video that shows this process below.

1. Choose 3 to 5 students to be the contestants in the game. They should sit at the front of the room. They'll need either paper or a computer, depending on how you want them to share their riddle answers with you.
2. The slideshow for the game (at a link below) is displayed so the class can see it. It will usually be on the game slide, slide 2.
3. The teacher draws two random names from the group and displays them for the contestants to see.
4. The contestants get two minutes to write a few lines of what those people might say if they met. Each student sends his or her lines to the teacher.
5. The teacher reads them to the class and they are entered in the game slide so the students can see them.
6. The students in the class now have the chance vote on the their favorite haiku (using a classroom response system or possibly Google Forms).
7. Points are awarded to the contestants based on the number of votes they received.
8. Steps 2 - 6 are repeated three or four times, then scores are totaled to determine a winner.

Here is the Google Slides presentation that you'll need to play this game or to do any of the activities listed below.

Click to have a copy of the Google Slides presentation added to your Google Drive. 

Video Overview

This 4 minute video shows how to play these creativity games with a class. It contains a different game about answering a riddle instead of writing dialogue, but the process is the same. (If you're interested, here's the post about that game.)

Tips and suggestions for other ways to use the activity

• Obviously this chance conversation should be brief. Students should try for 2 - 4 short lines.
• To indicate who is talking, students can use initials. So using the Spider-Man and Santa Claus example, a student could write:
• SC:  Hey Spider-man, can you teach me to crawl walls like that?
• SM:  Sorry Santa, lay off the milk and cookies then check back when you look this good in tights.
• You might not be able to fit the whole dialogue in the boxes on the game slide. Read the full submissions from students, but for voting, t's usually sufficient to just sum up it up a few short words to help students remember each one.
• Usually the students make funny conversations in this game, but you could require different criteria for the "best" one.
• Have some things to show the rest of the class or to talk about while the contestants write their dialogue. See my post about creativity exercises to get some ideas that will involve everyone.
• It's easy to change any of the names that I made for the game. Just draw one out and double click on the text. Use names of people related to what you're studying in class. Or pick names of people at your school, like your principal or the custodian. This gives the students a chance to practice being funny while still being respectful. Note that I did put "Your Teacher" in the mix!
• You can have the rest of the class write their own ideas for dialogue too. After the vote, have some of them share what they wrote if they want.
• If you don't want to devote much class time to the game, just draw two words at the end of class and have all students make a haiku for homework. You can select your top 5 and have them vote on the best one as a warm-up in a later class.