Exploring the Features of Genially

I recently put out a survey asking you all what program you most wanted to learn about, and the answer was resoundingly clear. Genially. In fact, just before making this video, I got a DM from a guy asking me if I had ever tried out this program called Genially. Now, I have to say I was a little bit reluctant at first. I mean, how many presentation tools does a teacher actually need? I've already got Google Slides, PowerPoint, Canva, Prezi. You can even make presentations in Adobe. But then I realized all these little elements that I'm always teaching people hacks for how to do in those other programs like make clickable elements, drag and drop, how to draw directly on slides, how to add cool animations. All those are directly built in to Genially. So do you really need another presentation tool? If you're going to use Genially, the answer might be yes. Hey, everyone, it's Sam Kary with New Ed Tech Classroom. And on this channel, we show you everything you need to know about teaching with technology. Genially is a pretty robust program with lots of different features and there's no way I could cover all of them in a single video. So what I'm going to do in this video is start by teaching you how to make interactive presentations. And all the tools I'm going to teach you for how to make an interactive presentation will also apply to all the other types of creations that you can do in Genially. Before we jump into the nuts and bolts, I'm just going to show you a couple of examples so you can get an idea of what Genially is all about. First of all, you're going to notice that Genially presentations are just significantly more eye-catching. And they have different things like animated text and images that are going to grab students'attention. And then you can also use Genially to make interactive images. And what you can do here is add different icons on top of an image that then become clickable. And of course teachers have also used Genially in lots of creative ways like making choice boards. So here you can see one where students would be able to click on the different options. And then some instructions are going to pop up about what they would do. You can also use it to create these interactive escape room games where students would have to answer questions correctly in order to continue to move through the presentation. Similarly, you can use Genially to set up these interactive quizzes and you can also use it to do things like make clickable infographics. Now another reason I think you should consider using Genially in your classroom is just that it can also be a really powerful creativity tool because you can show students how to do all of these different types of creations as well. Depending on how you look at it, one potential downside of Genially is that there's a lot going on in the program, so it can be a little bit difficult to figure out exactly how to get started. And that's why you should start with pre-created templates. However, before even checking out the pre-created templates, what you should do first is go to the inspiration tab and check out what other creations have already been made by other educators. This tab is where I pulled all those examples I just showed you, and if any of these creations has this blue reuse button on it, that means the person who created the original version is allowing you to use what they've already made as a template. Thanks. That's very kind of you. So that would be one way that you can get some pre-created templates. And we're going to go back here in just a moment, but another would be to go up to create genially and then select any of the types of content that you want to create. Since this video is about interactive presentations, I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And then you can also search specifically for education templates here as well. There you'll see a bunch of different pre-created education templates that you can take, edit, and use however you'd like. It is important to note that if you see this little star on top of any Genially pre-created template that does indicate that it is part of the premium plan. Premium plans cost about five bucks in Genially so it's not super expensive but it is important to note that you would need to pay to access some of the templates here. Let's hop back over to the inspiration tab and I'm going to choose this digital story template to show you some of the key features of a Genially presentation. So again, I'll click on it, click use as template. And then once I pulled it up, you'll see on the left-hand side of the screen, all of the individual slides in this presentation. To edit elements on an individual slide, you just need to click on them. And then you'll see an editing menu show up with traditional formatting tools, like making the font bold or italicized or changing the color. Now this slide obviously already has elements like text and images on it. So let's look at how we can actually make those elements interactive. or animate them to make them look more interesting. When you click on the text, you'll see a menu with some different options pop up directly above it. And one of them is this animation tool. If you click on it, it's going to pull up a menu where you can customize how the text appears on the screen. Now with Google Slides, for example, you can really only animate text and images when they first appear on the presentation. But with Genially, you can make those animations ongoing to make it look more visually appealing. For example, you can click to animate the text to be continually pulsing. You can make the text flash like a notification or you can do things like making it float up and down. Another cool feature is that you can set the animations to trigger when you hover your mouse over them. I particularly like this little rotation animation, this expand one, wobble, as well as this zoom one because they can help draw students attention. ...to text on the screen. Now next to the animations you're gonna see an option to click on a pointing finger icon and that's gonna allow you to add interactivity to your slide. Now Genially gives you four options for making any element interactive. You have a tooltip, a window, go to page, and link. I'm gonna hop over here to a different slide in this presentation to take a look at how all these work. So I'm gonna click on this hot air balloon and then I'm going to select on that pointing finger again to make this hot air balloon clickable and interactive. I'm going to start with this tooltip interactivity, and that's going to allow me to add a little bit of text that's going to pop up when a student clicks on the balloon. So here I'll just type the text that I want to pop up and then click save. And then to preview what it's going to look like, I'll click on the preview icon on the top right hand side of the screen. So now you can see how the text just pops out when I hover over the balloon. And when I click on this interactivity icon at the top, you'll also notice that this presentation already has other interactive elements in it. Let's check those out. So I'm going to exit preview mode here and then click on science. Then I'll click the interactive icon and there rather than point up the menu you'll see that it's going to show me that this element already includes the go to page interactivity and that it's set to jump to the fourth slide. Hit preview again, click on science, and you'll see that it jumps directly to the science page. Then clicking this home icon is going to return me back to the original page. One way that you can use this go to page is to set up activities where students would be directed to different pages depending on how they click. So let's say that you ask students to answer a basic question here. What you could do is create a page that says correct answer on it and then set up another page with some information to help reteach those concepts. And then when you go back to your original quiz question page, you would select where you want students to click, go to interactivity, choose go to page, and then have that particular answer redirect. to the page where you want it to go. Then we could also go over to the interactivity tab on the left hand side of the screen, select the home icon, and make that home icon return back to the original quiz question. So here in presentation mode you can see that if a student chooses the correct answer it's going to take them to a page that tells them that that answer is correct, whereas if they click on the wrong answer then it's going to take them to that page where they'll be able to get some information to help reteach the concept. It is important to note that if you set up something like this, you should treat it as a formative assessment because there's no internal grading system in Genially, and there's no real way for you to go check students'work. So it's more just about them checking their own understanding and doing some self-monitoring of their own learning. I'll go to this next slide here and choose the image of the fairy, and then I'm going to choose that interactivity icon again. This time, though, I'm going to select window, which is going to work best if you have longer pieces of text. So let's say, for example, that you wanted to give students some background information about the history of fairies here. what you could do is just copy and paste that text in and then when a student clicks on it, an entire window of text is going to pop up. So if you wanted a video to pop up instead of a piece of text, you would just select link, paste the link to a video that you want to pop up, and then click save. And then you'll see here in preview mode that when a student clicks on the text, a little video is going to pop up directly on the screen that they can click and watch. Now you can also add hyperlink interactivity to a Genially presentation. So for example, if you wanted students to read more about what it means to make a digital diary, just highlight the text, click interactivity, select link, and then just copy and paste the URL to a web page. I'd recommend leaving this open in a new tab setting on so that when a student clicks the link, it's going to pop up in a separate tab and then they'll be able to easily navigate back to the original presentation. There are a few other things I want to show you about Genially presentations like how to create drag and drop activities, how to draw directly on a Genially presentation. as well as how to embed audio. So let's hop back over here to the main Genially dashboard and I'm going to go up to the blue create Genially button. I'll click on presentations again and then I'm going to choose this stem presentation and select use this template. Here you'll notice when you choose a template that you have the option to either just bring in a single slide or select all. I'm just going to select all here and then click add to bring those into my own dashboard. You'll notice that this interface looks exactly like the other one and in addition to the slides that are already pre-created you can also click on this blue add page button to just add a new one. When I click on add page it's going to give me an option to either start from a blank page or to start with one of these pre-created slide templates. I'm just going to choose a blank one here to create my own from scratch so I can show you how some of these other tools work. Now on the top left hand side of the screen you'll see that there's a text tool and this is just going to allow me to bring in some different types of text with different fonts. And then I can just drag it around wherever I want it to go and type out what I want to say. Beneath the text tool there's also an image tool and here you can search for images using tools like Pixabay and Unsplash. So I'm just going to look for one that represents drawing here and then I'll drag and drop that in. as well. Beneath images you'll also see there is a resources tab and here's where you could pull in different icons and shapes. So I'll just look for an icon that represents drawing and drag that in too. So what I'm going to do here is bring in a square shape and then I'm going to add some text above it that tells students to draw a self portrait. Now the default setting in Genially actually does not allow students to draw on presentations so to change that you need to go up to the top right hand side of the screen select preferences and there you'll need to turn on the option to paint on the Genially. Now in present mode you'll see that there's a little drawing icon at the top and when you click on it it's going to give you some different options for colors and then students can use that digital stylus to sketch out their self-portrait directly on top of the presentation. Next let's check out how to make a drag and drop activity here. So this particular template would be a good one if we wanted to have students do an activity where they drag the different icons around. So I'm just going to change the text here quickly to let students know what they'll be doing for the activity and then I'll delete these extra elements that I don't need. Then I'm just going to drag these icons up to the top of the screen so that students will have to drag them and place them on the map. Now to make them draggable you're going to need to click on them and then choose the little hand icon and once that hand icon is colored blue that means that that particular element on the slide is now draggable. So now you can see that I can drag around these icons on the map. to show different places that represent my family heritage. Now one last trick I want to show you here is just how you can also embed audio directly into a Genially presentation. So here you would want to go to the insert tab, select audio, and there you'll see that you have an option to actually record audio directly in Genially. So you could hit that button, record some instructions that you want to say for students to make this more accessible, and then you'll see that that audio file is going to show up directly on. this presentation. And then in present mode you'll see this little audio file that students can listen to in order to hear instructions about the activity that you're asking them to do. Now of course you could just present this in front of students but if you created a drag and drop or a drawing activity then you're going to want to share the Genially directly with them. So the way that you're going to do that is by going up to all set you're going to choose to publish this Genially presentation. I'm just going to choose to publish it privately here, but if you have something that you want to share with others, you can also choose to make it public. And then after clicking all set, you'll see that it's going to give you an option to share the presentation. If you click on the three dots where it says others, you'll notice that there's an option to share this Genially to Google Classroom or to Microsoft Teams. Now if you choose Google Classroom, it's going to walk you through the process of creating the assignment. And what it's going to do is put a link to a Genially presentation in the assignment that's in Google Classroom. Now the way that this is going to work is that when students open up Google Classroom they're going to click on that link and every time they click on the link it's going to open up a new Genially presentation. So going this route would be best if you just have some quick activities that you want students to do but if you want students to actually have their own template saved for them in Genially then they are going to need to create a Genially account first and then what you can do is hover over that presentation select share to, and then you'll be able to enter the email addresses of students that you want to share this template to. Note here that because my demo student does not have a Genially account, it's not allowing me to share it with them as a template. So that's why I say that students do need to have those accounts in order for you to share it this way. But if you do want students to work on something over a more prolonged period of time, then this would probably be a better option for you than sharing it via Google Classroom. If you want to see how Genially compares to Google Slides, then be sure to check out that video above. And if you're interested in learning more about how to take a strategic approach to teaching with technology, then be sure to check out our free How to Teach with Technology Starter Kit. You can get it at newedtechclassroom.com slash starter kit. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next video.

I mean, how many presentation tools does a teacher actually need? I've already got Google Slides, PowerPoint, Canva, Prezi. You can even make presentations in Adobe. But then I realized all these little elements that I'm always teaching people hacks for how to do in those other programs like make clickable elements, drag and drop, how to draw directly on slides, how to add cool animations. All those are directly built in to Genially.

So do you really need another presentation tool? If you're going to use Genially, the answer might be yes. Hey, everyone, it's Sam Kary with New Ed Tech Classroom. And on this channel, we show you everything you need to know about teaching with technology.

Genially is a pretty robust program with lots of different features and there's no way I could cover all of them in a single video. So what I'm going to do in this video is start by teaching you how to make interactive presentations. And all the tools I'm going to teach you for how to make an interactive presentation will also apply to all the other types of creations that you can do in Genially. Before we jump into the nuts and bolts, I'm just going to show you a couple of examples so you can get an idea of what Genially is all about.

First of all, you're going to notice that Genially presentations are just significantly more eye-catching. And they have different things like animated text and images that are going to grab students'attention. And then you can also use Genially to make interactive images.

And what you can do here is add different icons on top of an image that then become clickable. And of course teachers have also used Genially in lots of creative ways like making choice boards. So here you can see one where students would be able to click on the different options. And then some instructions are going to pop up about what they would do.

You can also use it to create these interactive escape room games where students would have to answer questions correctly in order to continue to move through the presentation. Similarly, you can use Genially to set up these interactive quizzes and you can also use it to do things like make clickable infographics. Now another reason I think you should consider using Genially in your classroom is just that it can also be a really powerful creativity tool because you can show students how to do all of these different types of creations as well. Depending on how you look at it, one potential downside of Genially is that there's a lot going on in the program, so it can be a little bit difficult to figure out exactly how to get started. And that's why you should start with pre-created templates.

However, before even checking out the pre-created templates, what you should do first is go to the inspiration tab and check out what other creations have already been made by other educators. This tab is where I pulled all those examples I just showed you, and if any of these creations has this blue reuse button on it, that means the person who created the original version is allowing you to use what they've already made as a template. Thanks.

That's very kind of you. So that would be one way that you can get some pre-created templates. And we're going to go back here in just a moment, but another would be to go up to create genially and then select any of the types of content that you want to create.

Since this video is about interactive presentations, I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And then you can also search specifically for education templates here as well. There you'll see a bunch of different pre-created education templates that you can take, edit, and use however you'd like.

It is important to note that if you see this little star on top of any Genially pre-created template that does indicate that it is part of the premium plan. Premium plans cost about five bucks in Genially so it's not super expensive but it is important to note that you would need to pay to access some of the templates here. Let's hop back over to the inspiration tab and I'm going to choose this digital story template to show you some of the key features of a Genially presentation.

So again, I'll click on it, click use as template. And then once I pulled it up, you'll see on the left-hand side of the screen, all of the individual slides in this presentation. To edit elements on an individual slide, you just need to click on them. And then you'll see an editing menu show up with traditional formatting tools, like making the font bold or italicized or changing the color. Now this slide obviously already has elements like text and images on it.

So let's look at how we can actually make those elements interactive. or animate them to make them look more interesting. When you click on the text, you'll see a menu with some different options pop up directly above it. And one of them is this animation tool.

If you click on it, it's going to pull up a menu where you can customize how the text appears on the screen. Now with Google Slides, for example, you can really only animate text and images when they first appear on the presentation. But with Genially, you can make those animations ongoing to make it look more visually appealing. For example, you can click to animate the text to be continually pulsing.

You can make the text flash like a notification or you can do things like making it float up and down. Another cool feature is that you can set the animations to trigger when you hover your mouse over them. I particularly like this little rotation animation, this expand one, wobble, as well as this zoom one because they can help draw students attention.

...to text on the screen. Now next to the animations you're gonna see an option to click on a pointing finger icon and that's gonna allow you to add interactivity to your slide. Now Genially gives you four options for making any element interactive.

You have a tooltip, a window, go to page, and link. I'm gonna hop over here to a different slide in this presentation to take a look at how all these work. So I'm gonna click on this hot air balloon and then I'm going to select on that pointing finger again to make this hot air balloon clickable and interactive.

I'm going to start with this tooltip interactivity, and that's going to allow me to add a little bit of text that's going to pop up when a student clicks on the balloon. So here I'll just type the text that I want to pop up and then click save. And then to preview what it's going to look like, I'll click on the preview icon on the top right hand side of the screen. So now you can see how the text just pops out when I hover over the balloon.

And when I click on this interactivity icon at the top, you'll also notice that this presentation already has other interactive elements in it. Let's check those out. So I'm going to exit preview mode here and then click on science. Then I'll click the interactive icon and there rather than point up the menu you'll see that it's going to show me that this element already includes the go to page interactivity and that it's set to jump to the fourth slide. Hit preview again, click on science, and you'll see that it jumps directly to the science page.

Then clicking this home icon is going to return me back to the original page. One way that you can use this go to page is to set up activities where students would be directed to different pages depending on how they click. So let's say that you ask students to answer a basic question here.

What you could do is create a page that says correct answer on it and then set up another page with some information to help reteach those concepts. And then when you go back to your original quiz question page, you would select where you want students to click, go to interactivity, choose go to page, and then have that particular answer redirect. to the page where you want it to go. Then we could also go over to the interactivity tab on the left hand side of the screen, select the home icon, and make that home icon return back to the original quiz question.

So here in presentation mode you can see that if a student chooses the correct answer it's going to take them to a page that tells them that that answer is correct, whereas if they click on the wrong answer then it's going to take them to that page where they'll be able to get some information to help reteach the concept. It is important to note that if you set up something like this, you should treat it as a formative assessment because there's no internal grading system in Genially, and there's no real way for you to go check students'work. So it's more just about them checking their own understanding and doing some self-monitoring of their own learning. I'll go to this next slide here and choose the image of the fairy, and then I'm going to choose that interactivity icon again.

This time, though, I'm going to select window, which is going to work best if you have longer pieces of text. So let's say, for example, that you wanted to give students some background information about the history of fairies here. what you could do is just copy and paste that text in and then when a student clicks on it, an entire window of text is going to pop up. So if you wanted a video to pop up instead of a piece of text, you would just select link, paste the link to a video that you want to pop up, and then click save. And then you'll see here in preview mode that when a student clicks on the text, a little video is going to pop up directly on the screen that they can click and watch.

Now you can also add hyperlink interactivity to a Genially presentation. So for example, if you wanted students to read more about what it means to make a digital diary, just highlight the text, click interactivity, select link, and then just copy and paste the URL to a web page. I'd recommend leaving this open in a new tab setting on so that when a student clicks the link, it's going to pop up in a separate tab and then they'll be able to easily navigate back to the original presentation.

There are a few other things I want to show you about Genially presentations like how to create drag and drop activities, how to draw directly on a Genially presentation. as well as how to embed audio. So let's hop back over here to the main Genially dashboard and I'm going to go up to the blue create Genially button. I'll click on presentations again and then I'm going to choose this stem presentation and select use this template.

Here you'll notice when you choose a template that you have the option to either just bring in a single slide or select all. I'm just going to select all here and then click add to bring those into my own dashboard. You'll notice that this interface looks exactly like the other one and in addition to the slides that are already pre-created you can also click on this blue add page button to just add a new one.

When I click on add page it's going to give me an option to either start from a blank page or to start with one of these pre-created slide templates. I'm just going to choose a blank one here to create my own from scratch so I can show you how some of these other tools work. Now on the top left hand side of the screen you'll see that there's a text tool and this is just going to allow me to bring in some different types of text with different fonts. And then I can just drag it around wherever I want it to go and type out what I want to say.

Beneath the text tool there's also an image tool and here you can search for images using tools like Pixabay and Unsplash. So I'm just going to look for one that represents drawing here and then I'll drag and drop that in. as well. Beneath images you'll also see there is a resources tab and here's where you could pull in different icons and shapes.

So I'll just look for an icon that represents drawing and drag that in too. So what I'm going to do here is bring in a square shape and then I'm going to add some text above it that tells students to draw a self portrait. Now the default setting in Genially actually does not allow students to draw on presentations so to change that you need to go up to the top right hand side of the screen select preferences and there you'll need to turn on the option to paint on the Genially.

Now in present mode you'll see that there's a little drawing icon at the top and when you click on it it's going to give you some different options for colors and then students can use that digital stylus to sketch out their self-portrait directly on top of the presentation. Next let's check out how to make a drag and drop activity here. So this particular template would be a good one if we wanted to have students do an activity where they drag the different icons around. So I'm just going to change the text here quickly to let students know what they'll be doing for the activity and then I'll delete these extra elements that I don't need.

Then I'm just going to drag these icons up to the top of the screen so that students will have to drag them and place them on the map. Now to make them draggable you're going to need to click on them and then choose the little hand icon and once that hand icon is colored blue that means that that particular element on the slide is now draggable. So now you can see that I can drag around these icons on the map. to show different places that represent my family heritage. Now one last trick I want to show you here is just how you can also embed audio directly into a Genially presentation.

So here you would want to go to the insert tab, select audio, and there you'll see that you have an option to actually record audio directly in Genially. So you could hit that button, record some instructions that you want to say for students to make this more accessible, and then you'll see that that audio file is going to show up directly on. this presentation.

And then in present mode you'll see this little audio file that students can listen to in order to hear instructions about the activity that you're asking them to do. Now of course you could just present this in front of students but if you created a drag and drop or a drawing activity then you're going to want to share the Genially directly with them. So the way that you're going to do that is by going up to all set you're going to choose to publish this Genially presentation. I'm just going to choose to publish it privately here, but if you have something that you want to share with others, you can also choose to make it public. And then after clicking all set, you'll see that it's going to give you an option to share the presentation.

If you click on the three dots where it says others, you'll notice that there's an option to share this Genially to Google Classroom or to Microsoft Teams. Now if you choose Google Classroom, it's going to walk you through the process of creating the assignment. And what it's going to do is put a link to a Genially presentation in the assignment that's in Google Classroom. Now the way that this is going to work is that when students open up Google Classroom they're going to click on that link and every time they click on the link it's going to open up a new Genially presentation.

So going this route would be best if you just have some quick activities that you want students to do but if you want students to actually have their own template saved for them in Genially then they are going to need to create a Genially account first and then what you can do is hover over that presentation select share to, and then you'll be able to enter the email addresses of students that you want to share this template to. Note here that because my demo student does not have a Genially account, it's not allowing me to share it with them as a template. So that's why I say that students do need to have those accounts in order for you to share it this way. But if you do want students to work on something over a more prolonged period of time, then this would probably be a better option for you than sharing it via Google Classroom.

If you want to see how Genially compares to Google Slides, then be sure to check out that video above. And if you're interested in learning more about how to take a strategic approach to teaching with technology, then be sure to check out our free How to Teach with Technology Starter Kit. You can get it at newedtechclassroom.com slash starter kit. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next video.

Transcript for:Exploring the Features of Genially

Transcript for:
Exploring the Features of Genially