I need my students to connect course concepts and projects to art history, but I am not an art historian. Sometimes I assemble slideshows and speak briefly about each artwork as it relates to the studio artist’s search for hints and inspiration, but I doubt that these resulting lectures have been the best way to inspire students to greater artistic ambition and awareness of our roles as artists continuing a long tradition.

After seeing Molly Broere use Google Slides and a Jigsaw activity in New Faculty Learning Community meetings, I set up three activities with the basic structure of giving students a limited amount of time to research and prepare responses to share via Google Slides (see links with each bullet below). In my first three such activities, students

• Acted as docents for a Virtual Gallery Tour of the Carolyn Lord exhibit  (ARTS 105)
• Summarized tutorial videos and artist portfolios relevant to a highly customizable assignment with altered books (ARTS 330: Altered Books)
• Introduced each other to contemporary artists relevant to a portraiture assignment (ARTS 301: Transformative Portraiture)
  

By creating these education spaces for the students, I like to think students felt more agency and involvement in their own learning experience.

Advantages of this approach:

• Time to prepare before presenting boosts student confidence. This reduces barriers for shy or multilingual students.
• It’s less intimidating than a formal presentation. Anything to do with the word “presentation” and “slides” tends to form a negative first impression of the activity. I emphasize that the activity is casual, clarify that nobody is being marked down for filler words, and replace references to “presenting” with “introducing the class to [an artist/technique].”
• Student engagement and subject matter retention seems better than with long lectures.
• Instructors and students can refer back to the slides throughout the project.
• Consolidating class slides reduces time lost during presentations to tech handoffs.
• Instructors can control for quality by steering students to particular sources (if research skills aren’t the assignment’s main goal).

Advantages specific to remote learning:

• Instructions for the activity can be located on the slide to
  • reduce miscommunication about the duration of the activity or its goals
  • eliminate the time lost to students navigating elsewhere for instructions or asking me to repeat instructions
  • enable students to pace themselves within breakout rooms
• Shared Google Slides allow instructors to look over students’ shoulders, which means
  • less disruptive creeping into breakout rooms
  • more clues to when students have stalled in an activity and need help
• Browser-based slideshows reduce the need to translate instructions between operating systems.
• This activity could be synchronous or asynchronous. (This is especially reassuring if you distrust your internet or a device’s reliability on a particular day.) 

Tips & things I’m still troubleshooting:

• Budget more class time than you would for your equivalent lecture.
• You can embed Google Slides in a Canvas assignment, but Canvas won’t know to remind you to grade this assignment.
• I treat this as an in-class activity, so I have no advice on how this would work for a longer-term or larger-stakes assignment.
• Instructions within placeholders like “replace this box with an example of the artist’s most famous work” worked well for my students.
• Consider setting up a sample slide and presenting it before students begin their research (to model the amount of detail you prefer).
• Most students assume they’re limited to a single slide unless you tell them otherwise.
• Students need access to a computer. I doubt that a student calling into class with a tablet or smartphone could complete this activity.
• Link editing privileges in Google Slides to people with a link and principia.edu access. Remind students to try another browser or sign out of other accounts if they are blocked from editing.

Sources:

• CTL-hosted activities (especially Molly Broere’s New Faculty Learning Community meetings)
• “Jigsaw,” K. Patricia Cross Academy https://kpcrossacademy.org/techniques/jigsaw/ 
• “Publish and Embed a Google Slide” https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructional-Designer/Publish-and-Embed-a-Google-Slide/ba-p/244476
• “In the Presence of Nature: Paintings by Carolyn Lord,” James K. Schmidt Gallery, Principia College, http://content.principia.edu/sites/jameskschmidtgallery/