GAIN-Google Drawings

Google Drawings is a neat program which allows the user to create pictures, graphs, and charts, using different shapes, lines, colors, and text. It allows students to be creative with the information that they are learning. Just like Google Docs and Google Presentations, Google Drawings allows users to collaborate, as well as share and save online. Google Drawings can even help students and teachers to meet Common Core requirements, such as "Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively...and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears."

Google Drawings is a great tool for teachers to use to create visually stimulating presentations. This is especially helpful for students who are visual learners, and helps students in general to remember lessons. One Common Core requirement that Google Drawings can help students meet is to "Draw (freehand, with ruler and protractor, and with technology) geometric shapes with given conditions..." Google Drawings makes creating geometric shapes easy. Students can choose from shapes in the program, change their size and color, or even draw the shapes themselves with the lines or scribble tools. Google Drawings can be a great tool for math lessons.

Google Drawings can even help students with writing by, as Graham says, "helping them organize their ideas." They can easily create flow charts about stories they are reading or information they are learning, or teachers can create charts for the students to fill in. A Common Core standard to meet is to "Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text." Google Drawings easily helps to creatively meet this standard.

I had a good first experience with Google Drawings. Once one gets the hang of the different tools, it is quite simple to use, and quite similar to Google Docs and Presentations. I examined the elementary school lesson in Google Drawings, which was a geometry lesson asking students to manipulate (flip, etc.) different shapes, and to add more shapes as well to create a picture. I love that art can be incorporated to a math lesson, and I think that this would be a lesson that elementary school students would really enjoy. For an example of the picture that I created while experimenting with Google Drawing, please click HERE.