Digital resources in this day and age are a necessity.

With many students learning virtually due to the pandemic, TPT resources that don’t have the flexibility to be for both face-to-face and distance learning may end up hurting, rather than helping your sales.

What are you to do when all you have in your TPT store are printable resources? How can you convert these to digital without having to start completely from scratch?

Well my friend, this is where repurposing comes into play (and a little bit of tech know-how)!

In this episode, you will learn:

• Steps to create a digital resource in Google Slides after creating in PowerPoint
• Tips on using Easel through TPT
• A little shortcut that I like to use to easily flatten and secure my files (and upload to Google Slides!)
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Don't forget the watch the tutorial video here to see an example in action!

Resources and Links

Register for the Spice Up Your Store Challenge >> thesouthernteach.com/tptchallenge

Get certified in TPT Easel

Flatpack by Bearwood Labs

Submit a question for the CTP Q&A!

Let's connect!

• TPT Store: ⁠The Southern Teach⁠
• Website: ⁠thesouthernteachdesigns.com⁠
• Instagram: ⁠@thesouthernteach⁠⁠.designs⁠
• Facebook: ⁠The Southern Teach Design and Branding
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Kirsten 0:00

you're listening to the creative teacher podcast, a show for busy teachers looking for ways to engage, inspire and make an impact in their teacher businesses. I'm Kiersten, a teacher business owner who is all about simple and actionable tips, strategies and resources that result in wins, big or small. If you're looking for that extra spark of creativity, you've come to the right place. Let's dive in together.

Hey there and welcome to another episode of the creative teacher podcast. This is a special remix episode. It's a previous blog post that I had out there. And I wanted to make it known and have it on the podcast as well because I thought it was super great. It is tutorial style also. So this is going to hit on for those auditory learners, visual learners and kinesthetic learners for those who need to watch the video and do it alongside me. So you'll be able to read the blog post, listen to it in your earbuds on your favorite podcast platform and also watch the tutorial i'll leave the video up there. So I hope you get a ton of information from this remix Episode

Hey there, I'm going to talk a little bit about the process of converting a print to a digital resource. There's three different ways I'm going to share with you. There's the classic way that I first learned when uploading to Google Slides. There's also using easel. And additionally, there's a shortcut that I really enjoy with flatpak

Now let's talk about another way to convert print to digital, and that is through easel. Yes, TPT has its own easel interface, where you can convert digital resources. I know when I first created this video, it was still in the beginning stages, but it's gotten a lot better. So I highly recommend you taking a look at that. You can find easel in your dashboard, all you have to do is go to your homepage. And you can click on go to easel. Or if you already have easel listings, you can click on the little storefront icon, and then scroll down to where it says easel listings under product listings. So if you want to create a new easel listing, all you're going to do is click create. You can either create an activity for listing or an assessment for listing. So either one of those you can select. For this example, I'm just going to say activity for listing, you can start from scratch, or you can upload a PDF. If I upload a PDF, I can take one of my previous resources. And I can utilize that. You can also select which pages you want to upload. So you don't have to have the title page and other irrelevant pages that students won't be using, you can add exactly what you need. And then you're just going to click Import pages. When you initially upload your pages, it's going to be in the format that you created it in. So if you created it in landscape mode, it's going to turn out in landscape mode. If it's in portrait mode, it'll turn out in portrait mode. The great thing about it is that once it's uploaded, you don't have it doesn't move around, people cannot move around the image. And you don't have to like insert it as a background like you would in Google Slides. It's already done for you. So all you have to do is insert an answer box or some text, I'm going to just insert an answer box, I can change the font into something I prefer. And I'm just going to put it over my blanks that need to be filled out. The great thing about this is that it's already colored in for you. You don't have to do any extra finagling except to make sure it's on top of the line. And so you can still copy and paste as needed. So it's really easy now to create a digital version of a printable resource. There's also things like audio that you can add, you can upload audio or record your voice, you can add extra images or URL links, you can highlight certain texts, you can use pin, just to make it even more user friendly. Just to make sure everything turns out okay, you can actually view it as student would if they were to use it in easel. Whenever you're finished, you would just add to TPT listing, you can either create a new listing or you can add it to a current listing. So this is good if you have a print resource out there that you have not yet converted, you can just go ahead and make a digital version with the printable resource that you have and just upload it.

Alright, the third thing I want to do is share with you a shortcut that I highly recommend everybody invest in, it is so worthwhile. This is called flat pack. This is used for PowerPoint, PC and Mac users can download this, what you can do is take flat pack and save your slides to create a PowerPoint. So that means that I'm just going to click the flat pack icon after I get it all set up in PowerPoint, create PowerPoint, save it as a file and click OK. Then if I'm still using Google Slides, now there's a lot of steps I get to skip because I have flat pack. It's already secured. It's already flattened. So I don't need to upload a slide. I don't need to save PNG files. I didn't I don't need to do any of that. All I have to do is on my dashboard, my drive dashboard. I can go to New File Upload and I click on the PowerPoint that I saved using flat pack. So when you Oh Open a flatpak saved file, you will not need to worry about uploading each individual image, it's already pretty much done for you, you just have to make sure that it's saved as a Google slideshow instead of a PowerPoint so that it's formatted correctly for Google. Then from there, you just add your text boxes in the spaces that you need to. So those are some tips and tricks on converting printable to digital resources. It is something that I truly do believe is necessary in this day and age, not only to offer a digital version, but to understand how you can transfer it without completely starting over from scratch.

My creative action tip for you is to create your own printable to digital resource, start small and then when you get comfortable, you can work your way up to the larger resources in your store. Start with something maybe that you haven't updated in a while, maybe take the time to refresh it and then try to see if you can make that a digital version either through PowerPoint, going to Google Slides or just directly on easel. You can also take classes to get easel certified so you have a better understanding of what the whole process entails. If you go into your easel by TPT dashboard, you'll see a small little button near the top of the page that says enroll in easel certified sellers. You can also I'll make sure to add the link. But you can also go to teachers pay teacher's dot com forward slash easel forward slash certified dash seller. Don't forget to check out the blog for extra assistance. You can see the video tutorial hosted where the blog post is. That's it for today. I hope you have a wonderful week.

Thanks for tuning in to the creative teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode, feel free to subscribe and leave a review. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I cannot wait for you to join me in the next episode for more tips and inspiration. Have an amazing day.