Control Alt Achieve

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Creating Soundboards with Google Slides for Stories, Games and More

How can you bring some extra life into your class activities, discussions, and games? Ding, Ding, Ding! Yes, that's right, with your own custom soundboard.

A soundboard can be used in your class for many purposes:

It could provide fun sound effects for class games, quizzes, and competitions.
You could use the soundboard for audio cues for classroom transitions, such as indicating when time's up, or students need to clear their desks, or switch groups, or such.
The soundboard could be used while you are reading a story out loud to your students, to bring the story to life with sounds from the story content.
You could use the sounds to support and reinforce content being taught in class.
If you or your students are recording podcasts and videos, a soundboard can be used to for effects and transitions while recording.
And more!

There are certainly lots of options for classroom soundboards, but one free and easy tool for this is Google Slides. With Google Slides you can create your own custom soundboard with audio that you have recorded or downloaded from free audio sites.

See below for details on how to do this. You will find a 21-minute video I did for MoteCon24 where I go through all the steps, as well as links to my associated resource document, session slideshow, sample soundboard, and more.

My 2024 ITIP Ohio Google Summit Sessions

I am excited and honored to once again be presenting at the ITIP Ohio Google Summit at the Kalahari Resort and Conference Center in Sandusky, Ohio this October 28th and 29th, 2024. This year the conference is hybrid, with an in-person or virtual registration option.

I always look forward to an opportunity to see old friends, make new friends, share some ideas, and learn so many new things from others.

You can learn more about the conference at: itipohio.org/google-conference-2024

You can also view the full conference schedule and register for the conference.

Below is a list of sessions I will be presenting at the ITIP Ohio Google Summit, along with any associated resources. Please feel free to join me for any of these sessions. I look forward to sharing, learning, and chatting with you!

EdTech Links of the Week - 10-10-24

Each week I keep an eye out for the latest edtech resources through blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, user groups, and more. I then try to reshare these resources in many ways.

One way I share these is here on the blog in these "EdTech Links of the Week" posts. See below to explore the latest batch of resources, and be sure to share with others who may benefit.

If you want to make sure you don't miss new resources, you can:

🔗 View all EdTech Links of the Week: bit.ly/caa-links

📰 Sign up for my weekly email newsletter: bit.ly/curts-news
📧 Join the "Control Alt Achieve" email discussion group: bit.ly/caa-emailgroup
🔔 Get new blog posts automatically through email - FollowIt link

And as always, please let me know of any resources that you recommend. I would love to learn from you!

Upcoming Webinar - Cyber Assist: Using AI as Your Teaching Assistant

I am excited to be providing a free webinar for the OETC Postscript Series on "Cyber Assist: Using AI as Your Teaching Assistant".

OETC (the Ohio Educational Technology Conference) is offering these "postscript" sessions as a way to keep the learning going throughout the year as we head toward the next conference in February.

Here are the details on my OETC Postscript webinar:

October 16th from 4-5 p.m. (Eastern Time)
Cyber Assist: Using AI as Your Teaching Assistant
It has been said that with generative AI, every educator now has their own personal 24-hour assistant. Learn how to use tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Brisk Teaching, EnlightenAI, QuestionWell, MagicSchoolAI, Khanmigo, Diffit and more to help you generate presentations, create lessons, write emails, provide feedback and much more. Save more time so you can spend more time impacting students!
Register for free here - Registration link

Anyone is welcome to attend the live webinar. Feel free to share with others and I look forward to learning with you!

AI Summit for School Leaders

Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic in schools right now, but a lot of the focus has been on how teachers can use this powerful new tool.

Although that is great, it is also important for school administrators and leaders to explore AI. School leaders set the tone and expectations for the use of AI in education, and will likely also help set the policies and guidelines for its appropriate use.

To help with this, I am super excited to offer an AI Summit for School Leaders in partnership with OASSA, the Ohio Association of Secondary School Administrators. The event will be held October 31st and November 1st in Columbus, Ohio, and although it is hosted by OASSA, you do not need to be a member to attend.

See below for all of the details and registration information. And feel free to share with others who may benefit. I hope to learn with you!

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I already love the Fall with the change in temperature, beautiful leaves, and the smell of logs in our fireplace.

And Halloween is one of the high points. I love walking my grandkids around their neighborhood as we go trick-or-treating, and try my best not to eat too much of their candy.

Most years I even try to dress up for the occasion, although having a beard does somewhat limit my options. My go-to costume recently has been none other than Bob Ross!

Another favorite thing I have done is to create Halloween-themed educational activities with Google tools including:

🎃 Build a Jack-O-Lantern with Google Slides

👻 Halloween Rebus Stories with Emojis and Google Docs

🦇 Halloween Drag and Drop Poetry with Google Drawings

💀 Skittles and Google Sheets Math Activities

For convenience I decided to pull all of them together in one blog post. See below for details on each activity and links to the resources and templates.