Tech Thursday: How to Space Out Animations in Your Google Presentation

 I have something I want to do in Google Slides, but Google Slides doesn't allow me to do it.  So what do we do when something like that happens?  We're EXTREME ENGLISH TEACHERS, so we do it anyway!

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I give my AP students a Spotlight Reading.  This is where they get a small bit of text (or art) and use it to do a quick literary analysis of it.  I got the idea from the guy who led an AP training course and thought it was brilliant, so I started making my own.  It's worked well so far. They come into the classroom with this image on the screen:

That tells them to get out their journals they have especially for this activity. Once class starts and they have their pens at the ready, I click to move to the actual lesson slide.

The issue came up with this particular slide:

I always lead off with their thoughts.  I want them to feel confident in reacting off of what comes to mind.  The second question is more directed.  In this case, I really didn't want them to be influenced by the second question before they interpreted the quote themselves.  A good portion have not read Ellison's work, so the title for them would not be a give away.

So how do I hold off on the appearance of the second question?  Well, Google lets me do the following:

1. set the second quote to appear when I click the button.  How pedestrian!  I want automation!  So, the option Google gives for that is:

2. animate it to appear after the previous.  I can slow it down and it gives me 5 seconds.  Not enough time.

If you were to access the slide (here) and put it in slideshow, you will see that it takes a minute and a half before the second question appears on its own.  How?  Because of this thing below:

Don't see it?  That's because it is a transparent square.  You can click it and save it for your own purposes.  If I animate it and put it as AFTER PREVIOUS and move the SPEED BAR to SLOW, then that gives me five seconds.  So just keep animating it at slow speed for the amount of time I want.  Then, I clicked the text box I created for the second question and animated to appear AFTER PREVIOUS.  

Viola!  One minute and a half after the slide debuts, the second question appears.  By this time, my kids are busy writing and when they look up again, the question will be waiting for them.

I would love to hear either thoughts on how you have hacked your way around the classroom or what sort of passages I should add to my Spotlight Reading presentation.