For some time now, preachers and teachers have joined the education and business communities in using visual presentations with their teaching. This usually means the use of either Microsoft PowerPoint (for both Windows and Mac OS) or Apple Keynote (Mac OS). And these are the two software packages I have used for years as well.
But recently I decided to be adventurous and try an online slide creation and presentation software available free from Google. I had tried Google Slides several years ago but found it too awkward, unintuitive and lacking in features to continue using. Many changes for the better have come to Slides since then. The cost of admission is simply a Gmail email account login, which is itself free.
An easy way to access Slides is by going to slides.google.com from most popular web browsers and login with your gmail address. You create your presentations online and they are saved automatically online for you by Google. After working on a presentation, you can return to it later on any other computer with internet access. For a more complete summary of some of the features of Google Slides, read this overview on www.24slides.com.
I’ll close with one very impressive feature of Google Slides – the ability to easily embed a slide show into my website. Here is the presentation I created for my recent class, “Bible Study as Storytelling.” In fact you can follow my outline in that post while clicking through this presentation.
