Google Drawings can be utilized for an abundance of learning activities. Some are obvious, such as helping students create posters or graphic organizers themselves.
Other creative strategies involve having students use Google Drawings to make KWL charts or Venn diagrams of content knowledge instead of manipulating words directly. This reduces language barriers for ELs while simultaneously expanding visual knowledge representation.
Google provides educators and students with various tools that allow them to collaborate creatively and share knowledge, like Drawings. One such simple yet powerful application is Google Drawings which is widely used.
Graphic Organizers
Students with numerous ideas can use Google Drawings’ graphic organizer feature to organize them into an organized list. Graphic organizers also serve as an effective way for students to take notes while watching a video or performing lab experiments asynchronously before sharing their Google Drawing with the class to present it as their information source.
Students can create KWL charts or Venn Diagrams to document their understanding of an event. Students can add information directly into these diagrams by typing directly onto the canvas or inserting shapes or images.
Create a comic strip using Google Drawings is another engaging activity that gives students a great way to demonstrate their creativity while sharpening writing skills, as well as helping ELLs overcome language barriers through visual stimulation.
What is Google Drawings?
Google Drawings is an image creation application with various editing tools that makes creating charts easy. Use it to design flowcharts, organizational charts, mind maps and concept maps – even collaborative work can take place using this interactive white board and be embedded into documents, slideshows or websites!
Graphic organizers provide students with an effective means of organizing ideas and information and can serve as an excellent way of strengthening subject-matter knowledge.
With the line tool, students can create various types of lines such as freeform, connectors and curved. With these features in place, students can build diagrams that highlight important information and even add images or text boxes for creating infographics to share their learning experience with others.
1. Graphic Organizer
Graphic organizers can help your students compare-contrast, form well-reasoned opinions, and form well-informed arguments. For instance, Venn diagrams allow them to see how concepts relate, yet do not ask them to weigh the relative strengths of elements, isolate significant similarities and differences, rate or discriminate – all necessary steps towards developing thoughtful points of view.
Google Drawings allows students to easily design and modify graphic organizers like KWL charts and choice boards that enable them to demonstrate their understanding of a unit of study. For example, students could fill in a KWL chart before writing an essay paper and share it with fellow classmates for comments and feedback.
Students can use Google Drawings to create infographics and diagrams to demonstrate their understanding of different topics. For instance, students could use it to draw a diagram of a microscope or cell for science class or create a word web that illustrates how vocabulary words relate with one another for language arts class.
2. Mind Map
Google Drawings offers the perfect digital poster board or paper for you to express all of your creativity, acting like a blank slate waiting for all of your great ideas. As an interactive mind mapping platform, it makes for an excellent graphic organizer when writing essays or studying for tests or presentations.
Mind maps can help students connect ideas, identify themes and gain a deeper understanding of concepts through association. Mind maps can also be used to break complex topics down into manageable chunks that are easier for the brain to digest.
Encourage students to start with a central idea – such as their project topic, subject area or new information they’re trying to comprehend – before adding branches that lead to other ideas. Use different colors for closeness/distance from the central topic; label each branch with keywords so it can easily be searched in later.
Once your map is finished, share it in Google Classroom by choosing Drive > Make a Copy for Each Student > and selecting “Make a Copy for Each Student.” This will ensure each student gets their own drawing they can edit from Classwork screen before submitting just like regular Google Doc.
3. Create a Graphic for Website
Engaging students in creating graphics for your website can be an exciting way for them to showcase their creative side. Students can use simple editing tools like Paint to design something that represents a lesson, classroom project or any other subject they are studying.
Google Drawings can also be an effective classroom tool by helping students make diagrams or graphs. A student could, for instance, draw out parts of a microscope or cell in science class with Google Drawings while they use graphs to understand relationships among numbers in math class.
Google Drawings makes creating posters or infographics an easy and enjoyable way for students to communicate their knowledge, while simultaneously practicing digital citizenship skills like copyrighting and privacy protection.
4. Create a Digital Badge
Badges offer an alternative way of showing student learning and progress in your classroom. With more students developing 21st-century skills outside traditional school walls through projects, self-tinkering, and community participation – it can be challenging to authenticate their learning in meaningful ways. Badges offer one way out.
Digital badges offer a novel form of assessment that recognizes learners for what they have accomplished rather than simply rating one exam or assignment grade. As such, digital badges offer an in-depth view into a learner’s understanding and abilities.
Credly, Class Badges and Badgelist offer digital badge platforms that make creating badges simple or complex; each of them provides you with all of the information required to understand what it represents, how it was granted and any evidence supporting its validity.
5. Create a Google Classroom
Google Drawings is an invaluable collaborative real-time drawing tool for students. They can access it via the web or as a Chrome app and open and edit a drawing with multiple users simultaneously, including chat capabilities for real-time editing of shapes, lines, diagrams, images, text and arrows.
Infographics are an ideal application of Google Drawings, and Tony Vincent offers a great tutorial for how to create one here.
Comic strips can be easily created using Google Drawings. Students can add thought or speech bubbles to express themselves or talk about ideas they wish to discuss in a comic strip format.
Google Drawings makes an excellent environment for creating graphic organizers. Simply use its KWL, fishbone, or Venn diagram templates and share with students via its blue “Share” button; set permissions so everyone with the link can view before inviting them to click it and access it; when clicked upon they’ll be asked if they want to “File > Make a Copy in Google Drive” so as to save their copies onto their drives.
6. Show Your Work on a Math Problem
Google Drawings allows multiple users to collaborate in real time while also supporting a range of graphic art such as flowcharts, organizational charts, mind maps, concept maps and timelines.
Students can create tutorial graphics that demonstrate how to do something or define a concept, as well as infographics displaying their knowledge on certain subjects or to present statistical data in charts. Furthermore, this tool can even help them make Venn Diagram or KWL charts.
If you need some additional inspiration, check out Eric Curts’ site of Google Drawing resources or Jocelynn Buckentin’s. Additionally, Matt Miller provides great video tips on creating eye-popping infographics. Use some of these projects with your class and observe how they can enhance learning – then share it with us here at Shake Up Learning – whether directly through our site or the free Shake Up Learning community! We look forward to seeing what comes out!
Google Drawings can serve as an interactive digital poster board and can help produce some very cool assignments for classroom use. Here are 10 strategies for using it effectively in your school setting.
Create an infographic to document what you and/or your students have learned. Utilizing the line tool, make a timeline highlighting important dates and events.
14. Comic Strip
Google Drawings makes creating comic strips easier by enabling students to collaborate in pairs and give instantaneous feedback, or designing an infographic using its shapes for sharing vital information with viewers.
Get students designing posters about topics in their classroom or field trips they took this school year using Google Drawings to add images, text and a cropping tool to adjust its size as necessary.
An alternative approach to poster creation involves having students create tutorial graphics in which they explain how to do something or describe an idea. Google Drawings makes this task straightforward with features such as arrows, circles and scribbles for visual design as well as text boxes for explaining processes; callouts include speech bubbles for creating comic strips; this method works great when explaining math problems, science experiments or social-emotional concepts through tutorials that can then be embedded or downloaded as PDF documents.
7. Create a Digital Signature
Google Drawings offers users with various tools for designing diagrams, illustrations, flow charts, concept maps, visual storyboards and original artwork online. This web-based creation tool can be collaboratively utilized by anyone with an active Google account.
Integration of shapes, images, lines, and arrows that can be linked out to other content provides students with an excellent way to share their work. A science student could insert an image of the human body with hotspots linking out to organ or system content while English teachers can utilize book cover images and link out throughout their unit with details regarding that book’s information.
There are also plenty of templates that students can use to craft grids, hierarchies, processes or timelines quickly and visually. Students can even utilize the scribble tool for freehand signatures in digital form!
8. Create an Infographic
Utilise Google Drawings with students to help them create an infographic demonstrating what they learned in class or from research, an excellent way to demonstrate what they have learned while also serving as an assessment tool.
Make Google Drawings work to their advantage by having students use it to create tutorial graphics that teach someone how to do something or define concepts. This is a fantastic way for them to demonstrate their knowledge while encouraging collaboration among classmates at once.
Students can use Google Drawings to fill in and label diagrams. For instance, students could fill in the parts of a microscope or cell for science classes; or label quadrants of a coordinate grid for math courses.
Google Drawings make a perfect virtual manipulative platform, with Alice Keeler providing some excellent examples such as Algebra Tiles, Integer Dots and Counting Bears in a Boat. Eric Curts created an intriguing template to explore tangram shapes. You could even turn Google Drawings into an interactive whiteboard by setting “Anyone with the link can edit” mode before projecting it onto a wall for collaborative student work.
9. Create a Timeline
Drawings’ line tool makes it simple for students to easily create timelines. Once their timelines are in place, they can add text boxes with dates and vital details about an event; long enough timelines even feature clickable links so viewers can gain more knowledge about its development.
Graphic organizers are an essential way for students to organize and process information. Google Drawings offers the perfect environment for creating these visual aids. Eric Curtis has provided some templates you can use, such as Algebra Tiles and Fractions on a Number Line templates; Diane Main also created a Coordinate Grid template which is great for plotting points on maps.
Google Drawings make for an excellent virtual manipulative to assist in solving math problems or playing tangram games, helping reinforce math concepts while getting kids moving around the classroom. Simply create and share it as an assignment in Google Classroom so they can move objects on screen to solve a problem or understand information more fully.
10. Create a logo
Students can create their own logo using text boxes, shapes, arrows and scribbles – an engaging activity for younger learners looking to develop design skills. Once completed, their masterpiece can be downloaded onto a computer for viewing later or saved as an image file for later sharing or saving as an image file.
Google Drawings are an ideal way to use digital whiteboards. Once shared among multiple people or the entire class, a Google Drawing becomes an interactive white board which everyone in real-time can control – providing an ideal alternative to more costly systems like SMART or Promethean that only permit one student at a time to make changes.
Google Drawings is not only useful for making diagrams; it can also serve as an invaluable way for students to practice the scientific method. They can record observations in Google Drawings and share it with teachers or classmates for collaboration. Using the blue share button in the upper right corner, students can view or edit an existing Google Drawing; you can force a copy by changing “edit” with “copy.” This ensures each student has their own version without being changed or deleted by other users.
11. Sketch Notes
Google Drawings features many visual tools designed to create different kinds of images, from diagrams and tables to charts that students can use to share data. To add one, click Insert tab and choose your type of chart or graph.
Google Drawings offer students an effective tool for creating graphic organizers. Students can utilize this resource to organize their ideas and information before writing their papers; creating KWL, Fishbone or Venn diagrams with this software is simple!
Word webs can be an engaging graphic organizer for students to make. They provide an effective way of sorting vocabulary words or terms into categories and adding keywords or key concepts to each box, before sharing their Google Drawing with classmates and having them categorize the terms. Eric Curts provides excellent resources and lessons related to Google Drawing that students can utilize for this activity.
12. Magnetic Poetry
Magnetic poetry provides students with a fun way to create word jumbles that they can move around a surface, providing writing prompts or poetry lessons with magnetic poetry templates online or using Google Drawings templates here.
Google Drawings makes it easy to create digital versions of traditional classroom manipulatives such as KWL charts, fishbone diagrams and Venn diagrams that you can share with students via “Anyone with the link can view,” or use Google Classroom to add them as assignments (graded) or announcements – with options to make copies for each student.
Use Drawings to make Choice Boards, an assessment method in which students select from multiple options on a list. This provides a great way to differentiate learning across subject areas. Students can also use Google Drawings before writing an essay to create visual organizers containing images, text and arrows that help organize their thoughts more efficiently.
13. Other Drag and Drop
Students can use Google Drawings not only for drawing but also to make graphic organizers such as KWL charts, fishbone diagrams and Venn diagrams that they would fill in collaboratively online. This allows multiple students to work simultaneously on one activity at the same time while providing each other feedback.
This format is also ideal for labeling activities like cloze procedures or sequences of events – making the activity far more engaging than simply typing values into a table in a spreadsheet or numbering objects on paper.
Google Drawings’ text boxes are another useful feature, enabling students to add text anywhere within a drawing and move, duplicate and delete it as desired. This makes Google Drawings ideal for creating digital posters or word problems – Alice Keeler even created this Math Word Problem template that students can use for practice or exploration!
Google Drawings can also serve as virtual manipulatives for teachers. Eric Curts offers a great resource that features tangram shapes and other templates for use across a range of subjects.
Google Drawings can be used like a poster board or large piece of digital paper for creative projects of all sorts – here are a few ideas:
Google Drawing allows English Language Learners (ELs) to easily create visual timelines that reduce language barriers while developing critical thinking skills and supporting critical analysis. They may also use this feature to make Venn diagrams.
15. Annotation
Google Drawings is an intuitive diagramming tool with features including shapes, lines, text and images that makes creating diagrams simple. Available as part of GAFE, Classroom and G Suite (access may differ depending on managed domains), it is an essential part of diagramming success.
Students can use Google Drawings to make graphic organizers or concept maps, with connector lines representing relationships among concepts. Their drawings can also serve as timelines of events – providing an excellent opportunity for English Language Learners (ELs) to practice reading skills by visualizing narrative.
Students can create choice boards using Google Drawings as another method for showing their understanding of a topic by choosing activities that best represent it. Students can do this individually, in small groups, or large groups and share their choices with classmates or teachers through comments feature on Google Drawings – this feature also allows for discussion and clarification about selected tasks while serving as feedback to students.
16. Post Card
Google Drawings is an often-overlooked yet versatile feature of Drive’s suite of tools. It provides endless creative potential and can be used for graphic organizers, annotating images, creating infographics or posters – among many other uses!
Teachers and students can utilize Google Drawings to quickly produce posters without relying on poster boards and collaborate at once on them simultaneously. Furthermore, this platform enables interactive information sharing or real-time feedback from others in real-time.
Eric Curts maintains an invaluable website containing templates to be used as interactive white boards like SMART or Promethean Boards for this purpose.
17. Vision Board
Google Drawings contains thousands of images for students to use shapes, text boxes and arrows to annotate – either individually, in groups or as an entire class.
Have students create tutorial graphics to demonstrate their understanding of a topic. This could range from creating step-by-step visual guides that could aid others learning how to do something or a detailed infographic on said subject matter.
Google Drawings provide a perfect platform for new English Language Learners to label, sort and organize information in an effortless manner. These activities lower the language barrier while helping ELs feel more capable as they manipulate digital objects rather than having to read complex sentences. One Individuals and Society middle school teacher instructed his students to find photos of rivers online and upload them onto a Google Drawing before labelling their river with various parts that make up its structure – something this Individuals and Society middle school teacher did with his class!
Final Thoughts
Google Drawings makes using digital imagery in the classroom easy and brings many advantages for both teachers and students. Students can collaborate real time using this feature available in GAFE and G Suite (may differ depending on managed domain). Google Drawings features numerous editing tools that allow users to easily create flowcharts, organizational charts, mind maps, concept maps and more!
The line tool is perfect for creating timelines containing important dates and information. Text boxes, images and hyperlinks allow you to link external resources. Students may use the scribble tool for sketch notes or mind mapping as they brainstorm new ideas or break down topics.
One of my favorite Google Drawings activities is poster-making, whether in groups or individually. Students can use text and image tools to design posters advertising their favorite book character, historical event, or scientific discovery – and then print and display these posters in the classroom!
