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setValidation.gs

let validation = SpreadsheetApp.newDataValidation().requireValueInRange(rules).setAllowInvalid(true).build();

setAllowInvalid

Apps Script Knowledgebase

I’ll go through some of the code, but all of it is on GitHub. It’s written in Apps Script because again, a lot of the code was preexisting so I didn’t have to start from scratch. Most of it is modified from standalone functions I have running in separate functions on other sheets. The real challenge in this task was to wrangle the user input into something usable by the script.

The database

First things first - we needed a database. I threw together a spreadsheet with several data fields that hold different types of information. I started with our platforms as a high level filter and then added some tags. The user can search for all platform-related entries or narrow them down with keyword tags.

click for a larger view

There are two additional sheets to the template: one to authenticate users and one to build a list of district platforms. Authenticated users have a button to add new articles into the database from the web app (see below). Editing a really big spreadsheet, especially when typing multi-line, HTML formatted entries, gets really cumbersome, so I wanted a way to do that through the website. Additionally, standardizing the platform options helps the user narrow searches right from the start so they can find information quickly.

The bot

Setting up the bot is covered by Google’s Code Lab, so I’m not going into detail here. The main piece of the bot is that it listens for a mention by a user, finds the information, and returns a card-formatted response.

Our thinking for this app is that someone wants a quick video on how to do something, so only videos are returned. The main challenge is getting meaningful information from the user mention in order to match database entries.

The regular expression looks for any of the keywords mentioned by the user in a string. This was easier than trying to match array values and provides consistent results. Right now, a user can send simple requests like “Google” or “Canvas” to get general results. They can also include some refining search terms, like “Google gmail” or “Canvas assignment” to narrow searches down. If there are no videos that match the search, they’re pushed over to the web app which has articles that do not include video results. More work could be done to refine how the script processes user input to improve the experience.

The script takes the string an creates a regular expression which is then used to match a string built from columns one and two of the spreadsheet. If a result is matched, the YouTube URL is returned in an array.

Once the YouTube videos are grabbed from the sheet, they’re broken into video ID strings and put through the YouTube API to get the video title and thumbnail. The bot builds a card to return to the user with suggested videos. If there aren’t any videos available, the user is given a link to the web app where they can find written articles on their topic.

The web app

We also threw together a web app to display information that isn’t in video form. The idea being that these are longer articles that have step-by-step instructions and are meant to be used in conjunction with the chat application. Lookup can be done by either passing query parameters in the URL to the app or using the sidebar form to search for keywords within a given topic.

click for a larger view

Web apps also allow you to append queries to the published URL out of the box. If a query string is included, the app creates an object that can be passed through your script functions to build a display from a template dynamically. For instance, navigating to

https://script.google.com/.../exec?platform=ios&tags=airplay

takes you to this:

click for a larger view

When a video isn’t returned, we’ll pass back the user string to jump right to relevant answers.

Challenges

Writing logic to manipulate and understand user input that can vary wildly is very difficult. I’m relying on simple prompts (platform + search keys) to help return a video on every search. As the database grows, results will also improve. I’d like to spend more time refining the bot script to better process and use the chat messages. The regular expression approach is pretty brute-strength, but it works for most searches.

A bigger problem I discovered is that hosting a web app and a bot in the same script file causes things to break. Google makes it easy to deploy a bot from an Apps Script project. Hosting a web app is also quite easy and uses a similar ID string. What I think happens is that those ID numbers are conflicted when both are hosted from the same project. The bot’s onMessage listener wouldn’t register an event with a web app published. One solution is to host the bot in an unbound script that points to the same spreadsheet via the key. Another (probably better, in the long run) solution would be to write a web view that is hosted on a school server and access the Google Apps Script API to display database queries. More on that in this long demo.

In the knowledge economy, we need a Netflix of education - TechCrunch flickr photo by DigitalMajority shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Engage

It’s easy for me to stand up front and teach a topic. I can communicate ideas clearly and succinctly and ask students to demonstrate understanding with a variety of mechanisms. But, that sucks the joy out of learning something new (not that all students will love chemistry, but you get the idea). Ramsey Musallam and Dan Meyer are two really smart people I found early in this transition who helped frame my view of the engage portion.

Ramsey’s Explore-Flip-Apply structure fit well with my goals. Science is the practice of observation and I wasn’t great at getting students to observe phenomena. Use EFA at times, I was able to both engage the students in an interesting question and push them to draw conclusions based on lab experience.

Dan has pioneered 3 Act Math approach, which works to drive student inquisitiveness as a carrier for math instruction. I took his advice about practicing capturing perplexing things and started trying to photograph or film things that would be useful for engaging my students. (The previous link is a video about halfway through Dan’s 2014 CUE keynote. I recommend watching the entire presentation if you can find the time.)

This is hard to do, mainly because what I find engaging might not be engaging to students at all. Expect to swing for the fences and miss with some. As you hone your units, your engage activities will improve.

Explain

After exploring an idea, there will inevitably be misconceptions which need to be corrected. This is the Flip in Ramsey’s Explore-Flip-Apply. I can assess and gather information about student understanding as they explore and then I can use the power of a camera and a short video to instruct where students need the intervention.

If you’ve been flipping for a while, you know where students struggle. You probably already have a library of support videos you can filter into the unit. This also helps you identify gaps in your own instruction! Pay attention to what material students need additional help with and continue to build those resources out. Structuring your unit (not just a lesson) this way will also help you target which lessons are the most important, and that’s what students do. You don’t have to assign everything every year because the goals of the unit stay the same while student understanding changes year to year or class to class.

More on 5E

Each step in the 5E structure were not prepared for every single day of every single unit. Some components were easier to run across several days (or even weeks) because of low overhead (no prep, etc). Others were limited to specific dates and times. This is particularly important in a science classroom because of lab availability and safety considerations. Giving students choice in how they tackle a particular activity does not mean carte blanche. Specific constructs and limitations are acceptable.

Without repeating the linked 5E article above, Elaboration focuses on connecting to other ideas rather than staying within the immediate context. This is a great place to spiral back to previous units or to build anticipation for future units. It forces you to continue to consider the connections at the standards level rather than looking 24 hours in the future. Not only are your units more powerful, but your course as a whole takes on a larger internal support structure.

Final Thoughts

Much of this is written from secondary math/science perspective because that’s my experience. If you’re not in the same context, pay attention to the support structures rather than the individual examples. How are your standards mapped out? Have you mapped them out? Start large and work down to the day to day. This ensures students have a consistent experience and that the unit has internal fidelity to specific ideas. Looking day to day narrows the scope and makes it too easy to dictate the entire path of the course.

This is a skill that develops over time. There are strong communities of teachers on the FLN website and Slack channel. Get connected with others to solicit feedback and suggestions from people working on the same ideas. As you continue to zoom your lens out and work down to individual lessons your skill will build and your students will benefit.

Thanks for reading the series. If you have questions, leave a comment or head over to my website and drop me a line.

Featured image by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash.

Default Action

Defaults surround us. When I use my computer, I have a default web browser. I have default settings on my phone. When I get home in the evenings, I change into more comfortable clothes. Defaults help us work effectively and efficiently to accomplish a specific task.

We also have defaults in our teaching. When I need to quickly assess students, my default is usually a quick poll (choose the best answer from the board) or some targeted questioning to reiterate some important points from the activity. Those quick checks are routine for my students and the default action helps me effectively check for understanding without significant interruption of the class flow.

Defaults can also be dangerous. If I’m going out in the evening, my default clothing choice would not be appropriate. Asking students to answer a single multiple choice question (probably) won’t show me deep understanding. Our default actions need to be overridden from time to time depending on the situation. Relying on the default is particularly dangerous when you’re planning your unit assessment.

Understanding By Designing

This portion of the planning process relies heavily on Understanding By Design (UbD), also called “backward design,” developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigh. UbD outlines seven key principles which permeate all instructional decisions. I’m not going to go in depth on the entire framework in this post, so I encourage you to go read more about how to implement UbD.

At it’s core, UbD “helps focus curriculum and teaching on the development and deepening of student understanding.” The How defines how students demonstrate their learning. I cannot answer the question of whether or not students learned without some kind of assessment mechanism. The Golden Circle parallels the three-step process outlined by UbD:

1. Desired Results
2. Evidence
3. Learning Plan

We’ve already outlined our desired results by defining and organizing standards. Now it’s time to dive into the assessment mechanisms that will flow throughout your unit.

How Will You Know What They Know?

The purpose of defining the assessment before the lessons is to ensure you are hyper-focused on teaching the standards you outlined in the Why. This is absolutely teaching to the test and it’s absolutely okay. Understand that teaching students the material you outlined is expected! Don’t fall into the trap of labelling your instruction as “narrow” or “prescribed” because you define the scope of your instruction. If you find something is missing, you can add it to your unit plan! This is an important component of planning because your assessment, to be reliable, valid, and fair, should reflect the material you set out to teach.

As you learn more about UbD, this portion of your unit planning is for the culminating event, not necessarily day-to-day formative assessments. The formative checks are critical because they help you “correct the ship,” as it were, but those are more aligned to daily tasks, so we’ll plan those in the next step.

There are six facets for understanding defined by Wiggins and McTigh that you should work to include: explanations, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge. Your culminating event should be broad enough for students to demonstrate many of these facets and narrow enough to ensure they are showing their learning on the defined standards.

A Sample Culminating Event

You have complete control over the culminating event, so try to avoid your default action and plan a true event, not just an assessment.

In my general chemistry course, we spent a significant amount of time on the properties of atoms. Understanding how these little pieces of matter behave is important in later concepts, like describing bonding or chemical reactions. Luckily, we have the Periodic Table of Elements which describes and organizes these properties. A major component was my emphasis on the fact that the periodic table is relatively new - only in its current form since the early 1900’s after many years of experiments and revisions. I needed my students not only know how to read the periodic table (explain and interpret), but to also relate to it’s development and connect it to the nature of science as a revision-based process.

I can definitely assess their knowledge using a multiple choice and essay test, and those were a component as we went through the unit in the form of quizzes. But, I’m missing the other half of the six facets of understanding - empathy, perspective, and self-knowledge. By using a unit test as my culminating event, I was missing opportunities for metacognition and growth.

In 2006, NSTA published an article by Vicki Volpe which described a Periodic Table of Cereal Boxes. I modified the project and added a reflection my students would do to show their understanding at the end of the unit. By putting students in the driver’s seat, I was able to watch them assimilate all of the principles they’d learned over the course of the unit to create something novel. Beyond the chemistry skills, students felt the frustration of building a meaningful representation, not unlike the early organizers of the periodic table. The process involved research, drafting, and revision - and not just one cycle. The reflection included a strengths/weaknesses analysis of their table and many recognized that it wasn’t perfect, but it worked given the data they had access to.

The Role of How

The culminating event brings into alignment to the entire unit. Every standard was assessed in some way, but not in isolation. All learning is connected and our unit assessments should highlight and expect students to make those connections. Designing your culminating event should unify the learning standards and give students opportunity to show the facets outlined in UbD. As a bonus, these holistic assessment items don’t feel like assessments. The conversation changes from “we have a test over this stuff” to, “use what you know and show me what you can do with it.” It’s a rolling performance event for students with checks along the way to ensure a supportive learning environment. This is particularly evident in a flipped environment where students can go back to review material as needed. The support structure is built right in!

What’s Next?

Once you’ve defined the Why and the How, you have a framework which provides support for the What - the day to day items. We’ll look at that in the next post.

The featured image is Geared flickr photo by arbyreed shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Creating Outlines

There is no ‘best’ way to outline standards, but I’ve found it helpful to create simple documents for each unit I’m preparing. This focuses my attention and gives me one place to brainstorm ideas. I’m a paper-and-pencil first kind of thinker, so I have physical templates that I’ll scribble on as I work. It may also be helpful to print standards or write them on post it notes so you can quickly rearrange as you think, especially if you’re working with collaborative content teams.

If you’re teaching a single course, you really only need two boxes at this point: Standards and Themes.

Single course:

In collaborative planning sessions, look for common threads and throw anything relevant in. This is the brainstorming phase where ideas have equal vitality and worth. You can go back and refine later. Seeing standards on paper will help you set the big idea for the unit, so start at the highest possible level.

Multiple courses (cross-curriculuar):

You can’t begin to design coherent, innovative units unless you know exactly what you need to teach during that unit.

I find it’s helpful to verbalize a story. Why is one standard included, but not another? How are they tied together? What significance comes from the addition (or deletion) of one standard over another? If you’re unable to answer these questions or tie together a narrative for the unit, continue to work through standards until you have something you can articulate out loud.

Looking for Themes

When your standards are laid out and you can articulate a narrative, it’s easier to see common themes and threads. Try to stay away from restrictive topics like, “the 1920s,” or “cells and organelles” because they frequently limit the scope of thinking about material. What connecting ideas permeate all the standards you want to incorporate into the instruction? Brainstorm ideas. Bounce topics off one another. Keep a journal of interesting ideas to loop into other units or pull back in during a different course or even year.

Let’s take the chemistry standard again:

C.1.5 Describe the characteristics of solids, liquids, and gases and changes in state at the

macroscopic and microscopic levels.

This used to fall into my “Properties of Matter” unit (real original, I know). Instead of tackling this idea from a narrow materials perspective, it is rolled into a design unit. Why do we use particular materials for different applications? What industries rely on (or manipulate) some of these characteristics?

By opening up our line of thinking about how to incorporate a standard, our students can now take different paths to showing their understanding through lenses they define. It’s also important to remember that the unit or investigation you design might not fit every student’s interests. Knowing the endgame - seeing the big picture of the Why, will give you and your students flexibility in exploring different ideas.

What Now?

The meat of your work is getting standards aligned. Rather than dive into day to day activities (where we’re all comfortable), map out a sequence of units or even your entire year. If you’re in a district that has a scope and sequence laid out, use that as a starting point.

• Standards-alignment helps you see the big picture
• Tell a story with the standards. Think about flow from one idea to another.
• Identify potential themes or topics that include - but are not exclusive to - the standards you’ve identified.

Familiarizing yourself with the standards that are taught in each unit will help you open up different avenues for student learning. If you’re struggling to articulate why a particular standard is included, move it! You’re the architect of the course - you have freedom and leeway to design something meaningful for your students

In the next post, we’ll look at the How of unit design. How will we assess and evaluate student learning within the context of the Why?

Featured image: Where am I? flickr photo by Carol (vanhookc) shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Planning

In my early years, a unit was simply a sequence of lessons around a central theme. Essential Questions guided my day to day work, but instead of focusing on content standards as a baseline, I relied on thematic relationships. At the time, I thought I was giving myself freedom to explore related ideas no “prescribed in the curriculum.” In reality, I was making more work for myself as I pulled ideas in without a guiding framework. On top of cherry-picking pieces of content within a unit, I was trying to flip everything. That meant making videos and corresponding materials to help my students in their learning. The majority of my work was focused on lesson preparation and the overall unit structure was left to nothing more than the sum of the parts.

Flipped Learning has been around long enough for most people to have heard about it if not researched it for themselves. Sal Khan’s 2011 TED talk is a firestarter for conversation among teachers and administrators looking for methods to jumpstart some innovation. Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams have published a number of books about flipping at the classroom level as well as for particular subjects. Others like Crystal Kirch, Troy Cockrum, Robert Talbert, and Ramsey Musallam have written books (all linked) about their implementation strategies teachers can model as they begin to explore.

The Gap

There is a significant information gap when it comes to learning about how to successfully implement flipped practices. In a culture of Google results and “power skimming,” most implementations begin - and end - with finding or recording lectures that students watch at home and then “apply” in the classroom.

At it’s worst, the teacher becomes a non-essential mediator of student YouTube binging. At best, the teacher essentially resets the clock on student work, promoting passive listening and devaluing the net positives that can be gained in a classroom setting.

Sherry Turkle explores the advent of using technology to engage today’s “disengaged” students in her book, Reclaiming Conversation. Her point is similar - rich classrooms come with discussion and interaction. Savvy and intentional course design is key in promoting this interaction. Flipped Learning can help you build that culture, but only if you’re prepared with the right instructional tools.

So, our question: When you’re asked to design a lesson, where do you start?

Like many, you may identify your Big Idea and Essential Question for the day (don’t forget to put them on the board!). Then, you’d outline your instruction and some guided practice strategies after which you can assess student understanding of the material.

Lessons are easy. As a teacher, you’ve been crafting lessons since your undergrad years. Over time, they may be refined or updated, but planning is typically spent looking at a calendar, outlining day to day activities.

When you design from the top - starting with the biggest ideas and burrowing down through assessment and lessons - you are rooted in the main ideas. Those themes permeate everything your students do, which leads to more opportunities for exploration and discussions on related topics. You won’t need to think about every contingency to engage students when they lose interest because students will define those topics themselves.

Bubbles

Our worldview informs everything we do in the classroom. “The medium is the message,” the adage goes, and it’s particularly important to remember as you begin to incorporate video (or other media) into your instructional habits. The idea of an asynchronous introductory event is not a common experience for most of our students. How will it communicate a shift in the typical learning cycle?

Our bubbles are strong. Our brains work hard to fit new experiences into existing schemas. When they don’t fit, the schema is broken down and rebuilt. Working in a flipped environment will certainly break your students schemas about learning. If your schema for instruction isn’t being broken and rebuilt as part of the process, your wheels will spin.

The Big Picture

To address the shortcomings of planning effectively for flipped material, we’ll be using a modified version Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle” to plan out a holistic unit from the top down. If you’re not familiar with the Golden Circle, here’s a diagram:

The Golden Circle is meant to help organizations determine their core mission. In many cases, employees (or teachers and students) can quickly answer What it is they do every day. For example, a Microsoft employee would say they make software. A student would say they’re learning about the Revolutionary War or linear equations.

Most people, however, can’t answer the “Why” nearly as easily. Why does Microsoft make software? Why are linear equations taught in school? Sinek’s argument for the corporate world is that by answering the Why for your clients, you stand out - you become unique and a cohesive and productive culture develops.

Schools are not businesses, but the principles of the Golden Circle can be applied to curriculum development. How do we transfer corporate descriptors to the classroom?

• WHY: Standards, essential questions, outcomes.
  • Defining the Why in your curriculum is step one. It sets the tone for the entire course, defining the end results for students. Knowing which standards, essential questions, and outcomes you have for student at any given point keeps your instruction on focus as you plan. Looking unit by unit helps you tell a story to your students - it provides a cohesive overview of how things relate to one another.
• HOW: Assessment(s)/capstone event
  • Once you know why you’re teaching what you’re teaching, you need to define how you’ll know what students have learned or not learned. Step two in Understanding by Design calls this “Assessment Evidence.” What tasks will students complete in order to show what they’ve learned as you move through the unit? Keep in mind that this does not necessarily have to be a written test!
• What: Lessons, day to day
  • You’ve defined the Why and you know How you’ll be evaluating student growth, now you can start to think about the day to day work. Every single thing you plan for your students should support their growth toward showing what they know (the Why) and How you know they know it.

In our application, we’re going to put the Why at the outside, exchanging it for the What:

This Golden Circle hangs on a wall near my desk. It’s a visual reminder as I work with teachers to build units of instruction. Everything defined in the unit is nested and related: all of the What is measured and related to the defined Why. The idea is to root our planning in practices which focus on teaching standards with authentic and meaningful opportunities for assessment.

Admittedly, the visual analogy isn’t perfect because usually, when a dartboard is involved, you’re shooting for the bullseye. We need to get to the what eventually, but it’s always within the context of what’s around it, the standards and assessments.

Each post in this series will dive deeper into designing units of instruction rather than flipped lessons. Comments, suggestions, and feedback are always appreciated.

Introduction

Long story short, I moved from self-hosted WordPress to a static HTML site generated by Jekyll.

WordPress does it’s job really well. I think there was some statistic [citation needed] that showed nearly 30% of the Internet runs on WordPress in one form or another. That’s a lot of the Internet.

But, because of ubiquity, there is a significant drawback: WordPress sites are prime targets for malicious code and hacking. A plugin on my site shows how many dozens (and sometimes hundreds!) of login attempts there have been. It’s a battle to make sure security plugins are always up to date. That leads to other issues: incompatibility with plugins.

So, This entire blog - 2018 all the way back to 2010 - is a set of static HTML pages generated by Jekyll on my Reclaim Hosting server. No more logins, no more plugins to check and update. Just nice, clean, lightweight HTML.

It took me several weeks to work out the details for the migration. It wasn’t too bad, but I learned some things along the way that I’d like to share here.

Exporting WordPress

Jekyll uses Markdown and YAML data to generate a website. It’s quite clever how they pulled it all together, actually, to mimic a typical dynamic (database-driven) blog like WordPress. There is a plugin which will export your WordPress blog formatted for Jekyll, including all post metadata like tags, permalinks, and image resources. It gives you a .zip file which you can then extract and use to populate your new Jekyll site.

First, it extracts your entire media library. WordPress automatically generates several files for each image you’ve uploaded for different display situations. My media folder was well over 300 MB because I didn’t take the time to clean the library up. I’d suggest cleaning up any unused image files before the export.

Second, any pages you have on your site (not blog posts) get their own folder. Take time to go through each folder and make sure it’ll fit the Jekyll file structure.

Finally, do a regular WordPress XML export so you have an entire backup of your blog. The Jekyll plugin only converts posts and pages. If you have other resources, you’ll want to save them somewhere before deleting or redirecting your site.

Hosting

The great thing about Jekyll is that it is ready to go with GitHub Pages. If you’re already using GitHub, you can go that route with your username.github.io account with a single commit and push. I have a lot of traffic (humblebrag much?) to blog.ohheybrian.com already and I don’t want to set up a redirect. I’m also already using my GitHub Pages site for my (web apps)[https://dev.ohheybrian.com]. You can map a custom domain to GitHub Pages, but you cannot use HTTPS on that domain, which was a dealbreaker for me.

Each web host is different, so you need to see if yours supports Ruby 2.4 or higher. Lucky for me, Tim Ownes from Reclaim Hosting already had a blog post on setting it up with my Reclaim account. I followed his instructions to the letter and got it working on the second try (I borked some theme and file structures on the first, so I deleted everyting and started over).

SSL is a big deal. If you don’t know what it is, read The Six Step “Happy Path” to SSL by Troy Hunt (or anything else he writes, honestly).

Comments

I don’t get a ton of comments, but with a static HTML site, there isn’t an easy way to include comments. If you’re hosting with Github Pages, Staticman is an awesome and secure way to include comments on your posts. Another option would be to use a third-party tool like Disqus. I didn’t go with Disqus because they’ve had some trouble with clean use of user data in the past.

I decided to create a custom commenting form (based on this post) using Firebase. It’s a real-time database run by Google which can push information anywhere I want it to go. Each post has a query to the database to check for comments. Pushing the comments to the database is handled with a little bit of JavaScript, which I’ve modified from the linked tutorial:

Firebase also includes cloud functions that can be written in Node JS. I’ve never written any applications in Node, so this was a learning experience for me. This function watches the comment database and simply notifies me if a change has been made using the following script:

It could definitely use some refinement, but it does what I need it to do.

Updating

Relying on an Internet connection to write a blog post seems so 2012. With Jekyll, I can write in any text editor and then upload when it’s ready. If I’m on my main machine, I can even serve the page locally to see what the update will look like as if it were live on the web. It’s a small perk, but as I’ve moved to working more and more with text files (rather than things like Google docs) it’s nice to be able to open a blank text file and start writing. I can come back whenever I want and finish up or let it sit on the large pile of started-and-never-finished posts.

Conclusion

In the end, this is a highly technical shift away from something built for the end user into something I have absolute control over. If the blog breaks, it’s my fault and I will have to work to fix it, which is satisfying in its own nerdy way. It’s definitely not the easiest route to start (or continue) blogging, but it’s mine, which is fulfilling.

If you’d like to know more about how to make a switch, feel free to try out that nifty commenting section below or just write me an email: brian [at] ohheybrian [dot] com.

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Featured image is Find your way flickr photo by maximilianschiffer shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license

To Install

The code

The full source code is shared in a GitHub Gist. Note that there are two files: one called Code.gs and one called popup.html. If you’re copying/pasting, you need to create an HTML file (File > New > Html file in the script editor) and call it ‘popup’.

In action

The wheels of the web keep spinning…

to do:

1. Improve the connect to Twitter flow.
2. Work to improve the tweet posting time.
3. Confirmation popup when a tweet is posted successfully.
4. Error handling when a tweet fails to post for some reason.

Setup

First, the Slides API has to be enabled in the Google Cloud Console. Once that’s done, getting the thumbnails is pretty easy.

Off the bat, the API doesn’t have event triggers like the Forms, Sheets, or Docs. I wanted each slide to be tweeted as the presentation advanced, so I needed a custom presentation view. To get this to work, I wrote up a web app presentation window served by Google’s HtmlService.

This simple HTML page requests and displays the slides from an array created by the backend. There are some controls that hide on the bottom of the screen and a position indicator in the top right. Hover the mouse and they’ll pop up for interaction.

Tweeting

Sending the tweet is actually a two-step process. First, the slide thumbnail is posted and then the media_id assigned is attached to the tweet. This is all done on the Google Apps Script side of the code to account for security considerations.

Google’s thumbnail is generated and hosted on their server, so I used the UrlFetchApp to request the content as a blob. This is serialized data that can be passed on to Twitter’s image hosting service.

Once the image is uploaded, we can take the returned media_id string and attach it to a tweet. The Twitter API object for a tweet has a number of options, but all I’m using is status (what you’re saying) and media_ids, which takes the image ID string from the upload.

Right now, the string is hard-coded into the script. This could be set via the Apps Script UI tools if this gets turned into an AddOn at some point if I can speed it up.

Conclusion

The app works, which was exciting to put together and see. It’s a function that would be great in a number of situations and implementation will only get better as the Slides API improves. I’d love to work with someone with more experience to speed the API calls up significantly by including all the necessary authentication in the main script rather than in a library. If you’d be willing to contribute, the source code is on GitHub.

If you’d like to play with it, you can either copy all the files from GitHub or copy and paste the separate embeds here into an empty project. Add postTweet and getThumbnails to the code below.

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Mountain Bluebird flickr photo by Andrej Chudy shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license