How To Use Google Drawings In The Classroom

By Mike Kaufman

What I dear virtually the Google Apps for Educators suite is its versatility. At that place are and so many ways to finer utilize Google Docs or Slides that enhance student learning, and Google Drawings is no exception.

What I love most almost Google Drawings is that information technology allows students to work directly on an image. Students can circle, highlight, crop, draw arrows and write on the paradigm of their choice.

They can erase, add, change colour and transparency, and collaborate easily. Finally, Google Apps makes it piece of cake for teachers to give feedback by using the annotate characteristic.

Here are ten fun means to use Google Drawings in your classroom.

Annotation: While there are many editing features to explore in Google Drawings, for many of the activities below students and teachers will demand to know how to lodge and group. Watch here for a quick tutorial.

Annotate

1. Label Parts

Use Google Drawings to fill in and characterization the parts of diagrams. Insert the prototype you want to employ and let students get to work. Students can label the parts of a microscope or a cell for scientific discipline class. They can also label and explain the flow of energy in a food spider web or name the quadrants of a coordinate grid or the parts of a fraction in math class.

For deeper learning: Ask your students to define the parts or explain how something works right on the diagram using arrows, shapes, and additional images to assist.

2. Clarify Maps

Take students work on their map skills using Google Drawings. Students can mark the routes of famous explorers, create a map key, or characterization landforms. You tin create a matching activity by sharing a Google Cartoon with the terms already written in and take students drag them to the advisable locations.

For deeper learning: Take students analyze the map, describing and showing how human societies are affected past their physical surround.

maps

3. Examine Fine art

I do a unit on the Renaissance and part of our fourth dimension is spent identifying art from the time period. I take my students use Google Drawings to circle and arrow the characteristics of the fine art to help them determine the fourth dimension period in which it was created.

For deeper learning: Have students compare and contrast two paintings side-past-side, explaining the differences of time periods.

4. Written report Historical Documents

Google Drawings can be used to help students written report and clarify historical principal sources. Introduce political cartoons to your students and have them label the unlike techniques such as exaggeration or symbolism. Have your grade take a await at the front pages of the New York Times and circle the connections betwixt the headlines.

For deeper learning: Ask your students to research a topic and paste into the drawing a short excerpt, making connections with the groundwork noesis of the topic.

More: v MORE Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom

Organize

five. Graphic Organizers

Instead of searching for the perfect organizer use Google Drawings to make your own. Y'all can share it directly with your students or save information technology as an image and insert into another assignment or handout. Include images to bring the organizer to life.

For deeper learning: Teach your students about dissimilar types of graphic organizers and then have them brand their own. Students of mine but created web organizers to plan their essays. Each 1 looked slightly dissimilar and met the exact needs of each pupil.

6. Categorize and Sort

Create categories and add key terms, and so share the Google Drawing with your students and have them sort the words. Make sure to write each word in its own text box that style they tin can be moved separately. This is swell for new vocabulary words or spelling sorts.

Yous tin as well substitute words for images and have science students sort biotic and abiotic factors or accept younger students practise categorizing shapes. Using Google Drawings for sorts is also a nifty and piece of cake way to incorporate your interactive whiteboard into your lessons and get kids moving effectually.

For deeper learning: Have students set upwardly their own categories and terms to sort themselves or to share with a classmate to sort.

categorize and sort

7. Diagrams

Set up a Venn Diagram or KWL chart and break students into groups to have them simultaneously fill it in. Share the link with the whole class and utilize it as a "Do Now." Project the Google Drawing on the board and yous have a great starting bespeak for your lesson or class discussion.

For deeper learning: Have your students paste links or pictures of their evidence of learning into their KWL chart. This can act as an assessment or a digital unit portfolio.

More: 17 Ways to Brand Reading More Engaging With GAFE

Create

eight. Timelines

Google Drawings works peachy for creating timelines. History students tin create a timeline of historical events or to accompany a biography of an historical figure. Images searched in Google tin can easily be added and the bones editing functions will bring the project to life.

Students tin adjust the page size by dragging on the bottom right-manus corner to make it fit-to-print or to extend the layout for a longer time period. This would besides piece of work dandy for students in linguistic communication arts creating a character timeline or one of their own lives.

For deeper learning: Have students create timelines with missing information and so share it with a classmate who and then has to decide the subject and fill in the missing information.

9. Posters

My first feel with Google Drawings was a student poster-making assignment. Students had to write an acrostic poem about the Center Ages and add in images. They and so printed them and the students chose the all-time ones to hang out in the hallway.

Yous tin have your students create movie posters advertizement fictional movies almost book characters or historical events. Scientific discipline students tin put out phone call-to-action posters highlighting environmental causes they have researched in class. The upside using Google Drawings, like all Google Apps, is the ability to collaborate and the ease of editing tools, making group projects easy to facilitate.

For deeper learning: accept students add QR codes to their poster, linking their work to a video or a pupil blog. You lot can then put the posters around school every bit a way to showcase student work!

posters

x. Basic Photograph Editor

Google Drawings works as a great basic photograph editor. You lot tin can crop, suit brightness and dissimilarity, equally well as the color of the photo. It is easy to add together in text or symbols, and to make a collage of photos using the 'group' tool.

For deeper learning: Take your students create memes (images accompanied by text) to introduce humor to your unit and to bring a dry subject to life. Hither is a more in-depth look at how.