Stacy Crouse
- Jul 9, 2020

Adding Google Slides™ to your Teletherapy Activity Toolbox

I've recently made rom in my heart for another type of teletherapy activity– Google Slides! I love PDFs and Boom Cards, but having Google Slides activities in my teletherapy toolbox offers some different features that provide a ton of flexibility for virtual speech therapy sessions.

Types of digital resources to have in your teletherapy toolbox

Chances are, you're already using Google in other aspects of your life. Need directions? Google. Need a recipe? Google. Hanging out with a friend and need to prove you're right about something? Google.

Now we can add, "Need an engaging and interactive teletherapy activity?" to that list of questions. Google apps are full of possibilities in telepractice. As long as you can share your screen, you can use Google applications with your students to target a variety of goals.

What are Google Slides Activities?

Google Slides is similar to PowerPoint. Where traditional paper resources have pages, Google Slides activities have, well, slides (for lack of a better word).

Wait, PowerPoint? Slides?! Here's where we need to think beyond our use of PowerPoint to make stale presentations in high school. Hold onto your headsets, because talking about something so much more than that.

When used in "edit" mode (rather than "Slideshow" mode), Google Slides is a blank slate of possibilities. Each slide can contain text, pictures, fillable text boxes, clickable links, and movable images on the slides. More on all that in a bit!

Storing and Accessing Google Slides Activities

If you have a free Gmail account, you have access to 15 GB of free storage in Google Drive™, which is a cloud-based storage service that's accessible from anywhere. Even if you have a company-owned Google account, then you have G Suite which offers Google Drive™ storage.

Google Drive storage can be used for many applications, including your email (I'm looking at you, chronic email savers) and files in any of the other Google apps, including Google Docs™ (a word processor), Google Sheets™ (similar to Excel), Google Photos™, Google Calendar™, and my personal favorite, Google Slides™!

Instead of saving activities to your computer as you would for PowerPoint presentations, Google Slides files are saved in your Google Drive storage. This means that no hard drive storage is needed and they're accessible wherever you are.

When you want to access an activity, you open your Drive and search for the activity. If you're more organized than I am, you can navigate the folders you've created to find just what you're looking for 😜

Opening Google Slides activities on a laptop to use in teletherapy

Features of Google Slides Activities for Teletherapy

Let's explore some features of Google Slides and how they might look in a speech therapy resource. Most Google Slides activities will have some text and/or pictures as part of the background. This part of the activity is not digitally interactive, beyond just reading the text and looking at the pictures.

But where the magic happens (and what takes Google Slides activities to the next level) are the dynamic components that students can click, type in, or move.

Fillable Text Boxes

Fillable text boxes open up tons of possibilities for digital resources. In the postcard language activity below, the SLP or student can type the past tense verbs into the yellow boxes– just as they would write on a worksheet!

Google Slides postcard teletherapy activity for older students working on language goals

Movable Images

Another interactive component of Google Slides is movable images. These are pictures or graphics that can be clicked and moved to other parts of the slide. In this guessing game, each X can be moved to cover images of the people.

Speech Therapy guessing game for teletherapy using Google Slides

Clickable Links

Similar to interactive PDFs, Google Slides can also contain clickable links. Links might go to websites, other Google Slides resources, or slides within the same activity. The menu page of this language activity for older students has shortcuts to various slides for each included language activity.

How to Use Google Slides Activities in Teletherapy

So how do you make awesome activities come to life when you're in a teletherapy session? Enter, screen-share. Open the Google Slides activity in an internet browser and share your screen with your student. If possible with your platform, your student can use remote mouse control to access the activity, too!