Last week I published a short post about a neat new service called Video Puppet. Video Puppet will take your PowerPoint slides and convert them into a narrated video for you. If you're a Google Slides user you can download your slides as a PowerPoint file to then use in Video Puppet.
You can use Video Puppet for free without registering on the site. The limitation on the free plan is that your slideshow can have a maximum of twenty slides. That should be more than adequate for most classroom applications. Anything longer than that and students will probably tune out anyway. You're probably better off making two videos that have ten slides than one video that has twenty slides.
In the following video I demonstrate how you can use Video Puppet to quickly create a video from your PowerPoint slides.
"How can I use audio in Google Slides?" is one of the perennial FAQs that I receive. In fact, just yesterday I had two people send me emails with variations on that question.
There are three methods that I typically recommend to people who want to use audio with Google Slides. All three of those methods are demonstrated in the video in this post.
Method 1:
Use the built-in "insert audio" function in Google Slides. This requires you to have audio files stored in your Google Drive account. You have to insert audio into each slide in your presentation. There is not a native recording function in Google Slides so you will have to record any narration that you want to use in a third-party tool. In the video I demonstrated using Online Voice Recorder, but any audio recording tool that generates an MP3 will work.
Method 2:
Use a screencasting tool like Screencastify to record yourself talking while presenting your slides. This method will generate a video file that you can then share with your students. In the video below I demonstrated using Screencastify.
Method 3:
Insert a music video into your slides then shrink it down to the smallest possible size so as to "hide" it on the slide. Then use the formatting options in Google Slides to have the music video automatically play when presenting.
