I do not know if he intended to share it with me, but our 11-yo shared a Google Slides deck titled "The New Chat Room" that is approximately 500 slides long, where each slide is students in his class posting pop culture pictures &/or memes & using the ...

[Gast]

I do not know if he intended to share it with me, but our 11-yo shared a Google Slides deck titled "The New Chat Room" that is approximately 500 slides long, where each slide is students in his class posting pop culture pictures &/or memes & using the Slides comments to chat with each other about them—I knew that students used this kind of hack to get around school content filters but seeing it in action is something else

[Gast]

Last night the 11yo broke down the Google Slides middle school Chatroom for me:

1. At first they used a Google doc but the infinite scroll was too chaotic
2. In the slide deck each new slide is one “post”—some all text, some images, some both—
3. They use slides’ comments feature to “reply” to each other’s “posts”
4. This allows participants to easily flip between posts using the slide thumbnail navigation, so they can find the conversations they care about easily
5. He owns the file & if anyone spams it, deletes other people’s posts, or gets nasty, he can revert the file to its previous save state & remove the spammer’s access
6. He did share the file with me on purpose, I think because he was proud & wanted me to see what he’d made

Essentially they’ve created a chatroom with moderation in Google Slides, so they can get around the school’s ban on platforms like Discord. It’s kind of brilliant