In October of 2017, we published a blog post about Google Slides’ Q&A feature. When using a Slides presentation for an audience (students), you can pause it and ask for feedback in the form of questions, comments, or “wonderings”.  The resulting list of input from your audience gets embedded in the “Tools” part of your file, and you can refer back to it any time.

In this post, we will take a deeper look at how you can use the Q&A feature within Google Slides in your classroom.  Ultimately, the goal is to create more engagement and interaction from students.  In doing so, teachers can model to students how they can run presentations themselves with built-in time for audience response.  How can teachers take advantage of this great tool?

1. For early grades, the teacher can do a “morning meeting” type of lesson where the slide asks a question and the students respond. Such as:
   • Describe how you are feeling today.
   • Look at our class calendar.  What will be the date next Tuesday?
   • Were you able to complete yesterday’s lesson?  Why or why not?
2. During “Meet the Teacher” or “Open House” nights, the teacher can use Google Slides to present information to parents.  At the beginning, or at the midpoint of the presentation, a Q&A session can be started so parents can add questions or comments from their smartphones.
3. Q&A can be used during content presentations when the teacher is doing a lesson with new information. At some point, we come to a slide that displays a question related to the content such as:
   • Reading Comprehension — How do you interpret what is going on in our reading so far?
   • Math Understanding — pose a practice problem and have students use Q&A input to answer or describe their thinking.
   • Pre-Learning — Ask students what they already know/understand/assume about an upcoming lesson topic.
4. Start a Q&A session on a slide that displays a current vocabulary word (and its definition).  Ask students to respond by writing a sentence using this word properly and in context.
5. In the middle of a presentation about a novel the class is reading, ask students to use Q&A to post their predictions about what is going to happen in the next chapter or unit.
6. After modeling an upcoming research project for the class, the teacher can pause the demonstration and ask the class what questions/clarifications they have, or they could be allowed to claim the topic title of their upcoming work.
7. A social studies teacher can give information about a historic battle or a famous/influential person in history and ask the class, in a Q&A, what a great title of an autobiography might be. The class will use thumbs-up to vote on the best title.

For a great video tutorial about the Q&A features built into Google Slides, click  here  to go to OTIS for Educators PD Platform.  I hope you try this and let us know your ideas for using Google Slides Q&A in your lessons.  

For more tips, tricks, and tools for teaching in and out of the classroom, check out more articles on the Teq Talk blog.

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