When it comes to the family of Google Suite apps, Google Drawings is kind of an underappreciated second cousin. However, just like your real second cousin, once you take a few minutes to get to know her a little better, she's actually pretty awesome. It's then you realize the family is just a little bit cooler than you'd thought.
Recently, I guided a fourth-grade class through using Google Drawings to make comics with silly animal pictures. Using Google Drawings, the students searched for images on the web, resized them to put them into three-framed strips, and then added speech bubbles with text boxes for the dialogue. Students then took their comic creations and embedded the images in a Google Slide deck. Throughout the entire lesson, students were completely engaged in their work and wildly enthusiastic to share their creations with classmates, parents, and anyone else willing to look.
After students had put the comic on the first slide, they started making more, one slide after another, exclaiming, "I am making a comic book!" Through this process, they were learning valuable tech skills, such as photo editing and publishing, while also working on clear and concise writing.
To close the lesson, students were tasked to come up with other ideas about how they could use Google Drawings and Google Slides. They shared brilliant ideas such as making playground safety posters, citizenship themes, using photos of themselves as superheroes, and creating a slide deck showing the adventures of Lewis and Clark...a project we will be starting soon!
The process of getting Google Drawings into a Google Slide deck is a little step-intensive, but the typical 9 and 10-year-old students in this class were outpacing my instruction in figuring out what to do and were more than happy to help desk neighbors who found themselves a little confused.
Google Drawings is a user-friendly app with a lot more potential than first meets the eye and it definitely deserves an invite to the next Google family reunion!
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