Gallery Exhibit on Zoom using Google Slides

1. Tell your participants that in a moment they'll be navigating a virtual gallery.
2. Open the link to the gallery, share your screen, and demonstrate how to navigate the gallery. Be sure to click into different rooms, select an image hanging on the walls, and navigate back to the gallery room. Check in with participants to see if they have questions.
3. Stop sharing your screen and provide any additional framing (e.g., "When you're moving around the gallery notice what stands out to you and what you don't find interesting.") Let participants know how long they'll have to navigate the gallery.
4. Check in to ensure everyone feels clear on the directions before you send the link to the gallery.
5. Copy-paste the link to the gallery in the chat. Let them know this is a silent reflective activity and that they should be on mute for the time they are in the gallery. They can also turn off their videos if they want to. Make an announcement when they have two minutes left.

To get a sense of the prep needed to make your gallery check out this two-part YouTube tutorial.

Before you start adding images to the gallery, prepare all the images, quotes, and questions you want to feature in your gallery and save them as images (you can transform quotes or questions into images using Google Slides or Canva).

Use this Google Slides template to get started creating your gallery.

Once you have all your images gathered, begin adding them to the gallery walls. To add images to the side walls in the correct perspective, assign your image to the trapezoid shape. Check out this YouTube tutorial for more guidance.

Add all of your images to the "walls." Create an individual slide to correspond to each image. On the slide, place a large version of that image and if desired any additional information accompany it. Make sure there is a link back to the gallery room on each slide.

Link each image on the gallery wall to the slide that features that image. Do this by right clicking on the image on the wall, selecting "link", selecting "slides in this presentation,” and the corresponding slide.

In the gallery room slides, add arrows or text boxes on the left and right to allow participants to go from one room to another. Link the previous and next to the neighboring slide, eventually creating a full loop.

Finally, publish your presentation by selecting 'File' and 'Publish to Web'. Set the auto-advance feature to a minute so that it doesn’t force your participants through the gallery. Copy that link to share with your participants.

Test out the gallery using that link to ensure there are no dead ends or missed links.

The prep for this activity takes a lot of time, but once you understand how to do all the elements, repeating the steps for your different images is straightforward.

When participants are viewing the gallery, you can instruct them to turn their videos off. That way when gallery time is up, you can instruct everyone to turn their camera back on as a way to signal coming back together.

If you're using apps other than Zoom and Google Slides, here are the specific things your software will need to be able to do: