Ten Reasons Google Drawings Should Be on Your Classroom Radar

Since learning more about Google Drawings at last year's EdTechTeam Indiana Summit featuring Google Apps for Education, I can't stop using them! Google Drawings are a fantastic, highly underutilized tool for classroom use. As I've experimented with them and found even more uses, here are my top ten reasons you should give Google Drawings a try!

1. Interactive Posters
With essentially a blank canvas, students and teachers can create posters with text, photos, and hyperlinks to any number of resources. Even better, since Drawings are collaborative like other Google Apps, groups of people can be working on the same drawing! Check out this characterization poster with text evidence a five student group was able to create in about twenty minutes!


2. Text Annotation/Close Reading
Using a photo of the text on the poster or as the background, students can add arrows, shapes, hyperlinks to videos, websites, or other Google Docs to explain the text. Check out my post on annotating text with Google Drawings for more details!

3. Graphic Organizers
Easily create colorful, custom graphic organizers for students. Since we can type right in the Google Drawing, even on top of the shapes, we can go paperless with these organizers without the hassle of trying to edit PDFs. Here's a plus delta chart I created for students to examine Odysseus's leadership in Part 1 of The Odyssey!

4. Manipulatives
With the ability to drag and re-arrange the pieces of the drawing, students could easily be using virtual manipulatives (and you or an aide wouldn't have all that time invested in cutting out and laminating all the pieces!). Matching terms or labeling a diagram becomes a quick, visual activity. I used this vocabulary matching as a formative assessment midway through our unit!

5. Create a Digital Signature
While this is much easier with a touch screen and a stylus, it can be done with a mouse or on a track pad with a little practice. Just choose the "scribble" option to start writing!

6. Mind Maps
Make organizing, connecting, and hypothesizing about ideas visible through Mind Maps. Quick drafts could be made with shapes, arrows, and connectors!


7. Sketchnoting
With a complete source of options for colors, shapes, fonts, lines, and even freehand with the scribble option, students and teachers could create beautiful sketchnotes to visualize information! With the addition of a hyperlink, the sketchnote could provide access to the inspiration for it with just one click!

8. Timelines
A Colleague teaching Junior English American Literature and I brainstormed an awesome project where students would add to a Google Drawings timeline after covering each literary movement, insert links to literature, videos, and images, and then blog about how the ideas and style of that movement are still impacting our culture today. Students can even link their blog posts to the timeline! The beginnings might look something like this.

9. Storyboard
The ability to link images, your own and others, to the Google Drawing and to use connectors, colors, links, and text make this a natural vehicle for Storyboards to recap media, or better yet to plan student media creations!

10. Create custom backgrounds for Google Slides
First download the Google Drawing as an image. Next, open a Google Slides presentation. Choose "background," then "image," and select your file.

Year in Review: Our Class in Three Words

With less than a week of school remaining, the 2014-2015 school year is winding down. And, it has been one of my favorite years of teaching yet! From Epic Rap Battles to choose-your-own-adventure stories, from Dickensian tea parties to Socratic smackdowns, my students have made amazing progress in their learning, and we've had so much fun!

As one culminating activity for the year, I wanted to use one of the new Google Doc add-ons I learned about on this week's #gafechat over Chrome Extensions and Drive Add-ons, Tag Cloud Generator. I asked my students to use three words to describe our class, which they plugged into this Google Form I made to keep things anonymous. (The best part--unlink the form and delete all responses each class period to keep re-using the same Form!) I copied the results to a Google Doc, chose "Add-ons" and "Get add-ons" to find Tag Cloud Generator and add, then clicked "Add-ons" again to choose "Tag Cloud Generator" to use it!

Tag Cloud Generator created a beautiful word cloud right in my Doc of all the words used!

It is important to note that students should use single words when possible. If they used phrases to describe our class, I asked the to link the words by using hyphens to connect them; that way, they showed up together in the word cloud! It took fewer than five minutes, and I shared a screenshot of the wrod cloud with the whole class on Google Classroom!

Reflection on the Indiana GAFE Summit 2015

I’m not quite caught up for this busy week because I spent last weekend working and learning at the GAFE Summit in Franklin, Indiana. I love all things Google, and my first summit didn’t disappoint!

The event organizers did a wonderful job, and Franklin Community High School was an amazing place with friendly hosts. Even though more than 500 educators attended the conference, most with 2+ devices, our wireless connections were wonderfully fast and reliable. The building is equipped with amazing furniture which allowed for easy movement and plenty of comfort; the school even has charging areas with student-designed furniture! In addition to the expected adults in charge, Franklin had a team of students who gave up the weekend to serve as guides and resources for the event. Students even attended sessions to learn more about Google, and having a student join in a session about the new Hoosier Student Digital Leaders program sponsored by the Indiana Department of Education was an amazing opportunity. The young man was a perfect ambassador for the program, interested, attentive, eager to learn, and ready to add his voice to the conversation.  I can’t wait to get a student technology team in place at our school to offer our own students such opportunities for leadership!

The keynote speakers were dynamic and inspiring, as expected! Google Evangelist Jaime Casap stressed the importance of creating and collaborating--not “group work,” but true collaboration where students contribute equally to solve a problem. To stay relevant, Google is always trying to improve and building on its success, and we need to ask the same of our students. If they have mastered something yet, its our job as educators to offer them more opportunities to improve, show growth, and reach mastery.  If mastery is achieved, we need to push our students beyond that boundary and get them innovating. In that same vein, Jaime, touched on digital citizenship by explaining that digital citizenship is the minimum requirement in today’s world and the future. To keep improving, we need to teach our students to be digital leaders! Finally, he reminded us that we’re educating students for a future that doesn’t yet exist. By recalling his own journey with technology in education, he showed that the tech we are so fanatical about today will be our own children’s or student’s Commodore 64. They are using the worst technology right now that they will encounter.

I learned some new tips and tricks for GAFE, and I even had time to create two new class activities for this week during the training. Michelle Green’s presentation on Amazing Race and Iron Chef inspired activities led me to create one of each for my students, and Adam Seipel’s Google Drawings session helped me create a  beautiful, digital graphic organizer to help my students prepare for Socratic seminars at the end of our reading. Thanks to the Google Drawings session, I’ve also decided which GAFE feature I will spotlight in my Google Trainer application!

Some of my favorite ideas came from collaborating with the other attendees about the presentations; the presentations simply inspired the conversations we shared! In Matt Miller’s awesome presentation on Google Hangouts, one teacher shared the brilliant idea of using Google Hangouts on Air to broadcast and record morning announcements in the school. I love this idea; a leaky roof several years ago ruined our broadcast room, so a secretary has been reading announcements in the morning. This solution will offer a cost effective solution to engaging students in creating announcements, and an easy way to distribute and archive them for our school!

Most of all, I was impressed by the number of Indiana educators willing and able to give up an entire weekend to develop their Google skills and integrate technology into their classrooms! We are modeling the digital leadership for our profession and our students! I can't wait to try even more tricks I learned, and share them to make learning more relevant and engaging for my students! How will you inspire digital leadership today?