Part 1: Work on the MASTER  to create consistent theme throughout your presentation (and save time!)

Recently, Matt Miller (@jmattmiller) creator of Ditch the Textbook, held an event called Ditch Summit (free!). I was surprised and thrilled to see that one of the Ditch Summit presenters was Paula Martinez (@SlidesManiaSM) the creator and designer of Slides Mania. If you have not experienced Slides Mania yet, you need to pop on over to see all that she has created for you to use in your classroom.

Slides Mania is  collection of Google Slides and PowerPoint templates. This may not sound like much but wait till you see what she has available! There is a market, an interactive template that is geared towards Elementary and counting money (this can be found by going to Education>Interactive Templates):





One of my favorites is the interactive notebook (go to Education>Notebook Style): 



Recently, a World Lit/World Studies class used an Art Gallery template to display student work (go to Education>Interactive Templates):



So this brings me to this post! Paula had so much good advice but the major takeaway that I had from her presentation (I have probably watched it over a dozen times) is this:

"If you want your students to work on the slides, use the master slides as a teacher." - Paula Martinez

So, how do you work with Master Slides? 

Access Master Slides:
  1. Go to Slides.new
  2. Click on View, then select Theme Builder (this was recently updated from Master)


This opens up Master Template Editor. There are several things that you can do here. IF you are just making a slide deck and want to make sure that you have a consistent look, then modify the MASTER.




Modify the Master:
When you click on the MASTER, the outline of the MASTER turns blue. The outline of every LAYOUT that you are impacting with your changes turns yellow.  This is a great way to get consistent fonts and have a consistent look throughout your slide deck. 

Here I changed the Title font. EVERY layout that uses the title font is now changed to Giffy font (scroll through your layout slides to check this out).




Next, I changed the font of all the remaining levels to Playbill.




Now, I would like to put together my own theme colors.  Again, make sure that you have MASTER selected (it will be outlined in blue). Click on Colors.




A right pane menu, Theme colors, will appear. The current theme colors are included BUT you can change them to the colors that you would like to use! Just click on each of the colors (or just the ones you want to change) and select the new color that you would like in your theme.




Here, I have changed all my theme colors. This will make quick (and consistent) work on all of my slides. 



Finally, on the MASTER, I changed the background color and added a picture that I want to appear on every slide.




While you have MASTER selected, click Rename and give your new theme a name. 

Next post, I will talk about changing layouts and creating your presentation in THIS state! Why? Because Master Slides are for the teacher, what you add to the master cannot be moved or deleted while working on the slides (don't you just love Paula!)! Till next time! Smiles!