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4 Amazing Google Tools to Help You Engage Your Students

January 7, 2020

Have you ever found yourself in a classroom full of students, wondering if anyone is enjoying the content? Or at the very least, engaged and invested in what they’re learning? This can be a defeating feeling as a teacher, especially considering the hours we put into lesson planning. It doesn’t have to be this way! As teachers, one of our main goals in the classroom is to engage our students in meaningful activities. And it’s a huge bonus if we can plan these activities in a reasonable amount of time, with free and simple tools.

In this post, I’m going to show you four awesome tools that will help you engage your students in almost any lesson. Incorporating the right tools, along with a strategic approach, can help you engage students so they’re invested in what they’re learning. Every time. What’s even better, all of the tools in this post are 100% free! And what’s even better is I’m taking somewhat of a classic approach to this topic, bringing out some oldies but goodies. Which means you’re likely to have background knowledge in some, if not all of these tools, making it that much easier to dive right in.

Tool #1: Google Drawings

One of my absolute favorite and most underrated Google tools (in my opinion) is Google Drawings. Drawings can engage just about any level of student, from kindergarten right up to higher ed. Google Drawings allows users to create collaborative, custom images and diagrams quite easily. So, right away, you gain engagement with the collaborative nature and simplicity of this tool.

Have you ever found yourself at the end of a lesson where your students spent the entire time cutting out a bunch of manipulatives, only to run out of time and lose half of the pieces? This was me more times than I’d like to admit. Drawings can help solve this dilemma. One of my favorite uses of Google Drawings is to use them for manipulatives – and if you’re a middle or high school teacher and think manipulatives are mainly for elementary students, please hang with me.

Google Drawings is hands-down the reason I am able to successfully have my students complete our school-wide required word sorts. See this example to see how to set up a word sort using Google Drawings, and feel free to make a copy for yourself! Notice how the Drawing utilizes the space outside of the “canvas.” The directions and word cards are in this blank space for a reason. Only the student’s work will end up on the Drawing itself, and this means that if the student embeds or downloads this Drawing to use somewhere like an eportfolio, etc., the directions and unused word cards (if there are any) won’t distract away from the student’s work.

And just to clarify how I’d get this Drawing to my students, I would either have them make a copy from the link, like I did for you above (once the Drawing is open, just go to File, then Make a Copy, or, I could change the link to force the students to make a copy (learn more here), or the best way (in my opinion) would be to pass the file out through an assignment in Google Classroom.

Once you start manipulating in Google Drawings, you won’t be able to stop! You’ll find yourself using them to classify polygons, animals, sentences, and the list goes on (and on). And then you’ll find yourself in Drawings to create diagrams for the water cycle, human body systems, atoms…maybe you’ll create a Choice Board. Who knows?! The possibilities are endless!

Please do me a favor, think of one activity in your classroom, just one, that Google Drawings could enhance. Then brainstorm, create, and implement the lesson in your room. I have a feeling you’ll quickly be hooked on Drawings, along with your students.

Tool #2: Slides

Google Slides, Google’s presentation tool, is one of the most widely-used Google tools. Too much of the time, Slides is used to present to a passive audience, creating an atmosphere of low engagement. What so many people miss with Slides is that there are a few simple ways to make your presentations interactive for students.

Interactive Tip #1: Links

It’s really simple to insert links into Google Slides. All you need to do is highlight the words/objects you want to link, click “Insert” then “Link.” You can link students to other websites, continuing the learning beyond your content. It is also possible to insert links to other slides in your presentation. This allows for students to take a nonlinear path through your presentation. This choice and control gives students a sense of ownership over their learning, and in turn, creates an engaging experience. See how this lengthy slideshow is organized with a Table of Contents, giving the audience a chance to choose how they access the content. This is just one of many ways to increase engagement by linking to other slides in a slideshow.

Interactive Tip #2: Add-Ons

Not all that long ago, Google added Add-Ons to Google Slides. Add-Ons extend a user’s capability in Slides, making what was previously impossible, possible. One of my absolute favorite Google Slides Add-ons is Pear Deck. The Pear Deck Add-On allows you to instantly transform your previously passive Google Slides presentation into a valuable formative assessment or interactive presentation. Pear Deck does have a premium version, but there is a ton that you can do with the free version, so it’s definitely worth checking out! Click here to learn more.

Interactive Tip #3: Google Slides Presenter View

If you find yourself presenting a good, old fashioned slideshow without much interaction, please know that Google has an option for you: Google Slides presenter view. In the Slides presenter view (find it under the magical sharktooth triangle next to “Present”), you have the ability to start an audience Q&A session that can run while you’re presenting. This feature allows your audience to ask questions without interrupting the flow of your presentation. Viewers can also like others’ questions and comments so that you can quickly prioritize which entries you address. It’s a wonderful built-in interactive feature in Google Slides!

For more information on the three interactive tips above, please visit a quick excerpt from one of our contractor’s Summit presentation on Google Slides by clicking here.

Tool #3: Forms

Google’s survey tool, Google Forms, is an incredibly powerful tool. From collecting data to charting results by student or group, the possibilities are endless. Once teachers start using Google Forms, oftentimes they can’t stop! They’re just that great.

Want to take the Forms student engagement to the next level in your classroom? Try student-created Google Forms. For better or worse, students are influenced and motivated by their peers. They love having the ability to easily collect peer responses using a familiar, free tool. And as a teacher, I loved having my students collect data in Forms for so many reasons. Forms are:

Completely free
Part of the core Google Suite and can be created and easily organized in Google Drive
Easily emailed
Easily passed out or submitted in Google Classroom
Easily embedded into Google Sites

And the list goes on. What’s even better, the learning doesn’t stop there. Once students collect the data, then the real learning can begin. In just a few clicks, the data can be sent to a Google Sheet where students can analyze, chart, and manipulate the collected data. These charts can be easily pasted into related Docs, Slides, Sites, you name it. Now you’ve created multiple meaningful and engaging lessons all from one student-created Google Form. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Tool #4: Sites

Google Sites, or I should specify, the “New” Google Sites can be an extremely engaging tool. As Google’s website creation tool, Google Sites allows users to create a hub of information. Teachers love Google Sites for creating a classroom or unit website.

What takes the “new” Google Sites to the next level of engagement is to have the students create the sites. Google Sites is a super simple tool, so it lends itself to student use. When students are creating work for an audience outside of their teachers (and possibly parents), the level of motivation increases exponentially.

One way students can use Google Sites is to create ePortfolios, a collection of work that demonstrates their learning over a period of time. Think: a 3-ring binder portfolio, but online. And Google Drive files can be easily embedded into a Google Site with just a couple of clicks. And the file stays live so that when a change is made to the file, it automatically updates on the Google Site. So essentially it’s one and done as far as embedding the file onto the site.

What’s great about Google Sites is that you are in complete control of the audience. You can create a completely private site, you can share the site with specific individuals to view and/or edit, you can share the site within your organization, or you can make your site completely public. When having students create a site, I would have them work their way up to a more open audience. We always would start private, and then with safe online practice, the students could work their way to a more public audience (if that was appropriate for that situation). I am always extremely deliberate about safe online practice when helping students reach a larger audience.

Some critics might say that Google Sites aren’t super interactive for the audience. This couldn’t be further from the truth if you stretch your thinking outside the box. In order to make a Google Site more interactive, think about embedding a Google Form for viewers to fill out right there on the webpage. You can even embed the Spreadsheet of responses for viewers to see what others responded. Or link the users to an embedded, collaborative Doc, Sheet, or Slideshow. These are just a few options to get you started with making a new Google Site interactive for the audience.

Once you get students started with reaching a larger audience, you’ll immediately see a jump in engagement and care that goes into their work. You immediately realize you (and your students) wouldn’t want it any other way.

So there you have it: 4 classic tools to help you engage your students. My hope is to give you a new lens for a tool you might have already been using in the classroom. Which idea will you try first? And what engaging ideas do you have to share? Please share below!

As Director of Education Partnerships at EdTechTeam, Christina brings a passion for rethinking education to ensure experiences are learner-centered, with a focus on developing the capacity of others to lead and implement transformational work. Christina has worked in various roles in elementary, middle, and high school environments, as Associate Director of the Institute for Personalized Learning, and as a Manager of Partnerships at Discovery Education. She uses her experience as a classroom teacher, instructional coach, principal, and professional development specialist to understand the challenges districts face, and partners with them to create a design that works toward the district’s vision and goals. From Design Thinking to STEM to apprenticeship experiences, Christina is always looking for ways to further empower educators and engage learners in real-life experiences that impact their future.

How to Create a Custom Theme in Google Classroom

December 18, 2019

As teachers, we want our students to be engaged. We work to make content interesting and organized. And depending on your style, you may or may not spend the time to make your content visually appealing for students. After all, there’s not enough time in the day, right? But there are a few simple things you can do to brighten up and personalize your content by creating a class theme. And with the right approach, you can reuse this theme throughout the entire year.

Today, I am going to show you how to create a custom theme for Google Classroom. Classroom has some nice themes, but sometimes you want something original, something that is meaningful to you and your students. Your Classroom theme can become a hook where the engagement starts. But it might be a little tricky figuring this all out on your own, so I’m here to guide you, step-by-step. And what’s awesome is that we will be using all free, simple to use tools. You do NOT need a graphic design background for this, promise.

You might be wondering what I mean by Classroom “theme.” The theme is simply the header image for your class. It appears on the Stream page.

You can always select one of the themes Google has provided by clicking “Select theme.” We’re looking at creating a unique theme today, so we’re going to focus on uploading a photo instead. But first, we have to create this photo. And today, we are going to use one of my absolute favorite tools (and totally underrated, in my opinion): Google Drawings.

STEP 1: Create a New Drawing

Head on over to a new Google Drawing by following these steps:

Go to Google Drive
Click New
Hover over More
Click Google Drawings
Title your Drawing

STEP 2: Customize your Drawing

You want your image to be the size of the Google Classroom banner. The nice thing about Google Drawings is that you can easily change the size to whatever dimensions you’d like by following these steps:

Click File
Scroll down to Page Setup
Change the dimensions to pixels
A Google Classroom banner is 1,000 x 250 pixels – here is a template you can use with the correct dimensions already set. If you’re interested in measuring spaces online, check out the PageRulr Chrome Extension.

Once your Drawing size is set, the world is your canvas. You can change the background color, insert text boxes, shapes, images, and so on. You can learn more about what’s possible in Google Drawings here. If you have a class logo, this would be a great place to display it. Something I loved to do as a teacher was to have the students create their own, personalized logo using Google Drawing. These logos could be used as safe profile pictures (as long as they didn’t use their picture or location) for their online accounts. One idea for a Google Classroom custom theme is to have all of the student logos on the class banner, sort of as a mosaic. Seeing their own logos displayed together in the Classroom banner can instantly give the students a feeling of ownership and unity.

Step 3: Save your Drawing

Once you have your Drawing complete, you’ll want to download it as an image file. In order to do this, you’ll follow these steps:

Click File
Hover over Download
Select jpeg or png

Step 4: Add your Drawing to Google Classroom

Then you’ll head over to Classroom to upload your image – be sure you’re on your Stream page. To upload the personalized image to Classroom, you’ll follow these steps:

In the bottom-right corner of the banner, click Upload Photo
Find the photo on your device (in Downloads)
Rearrange, center, crop, or expand the image so it looks the way you’d like
Click insert

And viola! You have a personalized custom theme in Google Classroom. It may seem small, but the engagement and ownership this banner can create will go a long way with your students. Something else that’s pretty cool is that you can reuse this banner in other Google tools. It’ll fit great as a page header in Google Sites and Forms, or as an image in Slides and Drawings (or any other tool, for that matter). When used across multiple online settings, you’re now creating familiarity for your students, in addition to the ownership and engagement. All with one personalized image.

So there you have it – four steps that will help you create a custom theme for your class. What other ideas do you have that would help others create engaging custom themes for their class? Please share below!

More of a visual person? Watch our step-by-step video on how to create a custom theme in Google Classroom.

5 Time-Saving Tips Every Teacher Needs to Know

December 3, 2019

Time. It’s true when people say it’s precious …especially as an educator. We’re constantly balancing data, parent communication and relationships, meetings, testing, and the list goes on (and on). We all want more time to do the things we love, like plan creative lessons and differentiate to meet each and every student in our room. And while it’s impossible to add time to our day, we can find ways to save little bits of it in everything we do. And these little bits can add up, helping us become more productive, creating more time for us to do the things we love.

As a previous classroom teacher, instructional coach, and principal, I have always had to manage a multitude of projects. And for me, it was difficult to juggle until I came up with systems. Systems keep me in line, especially when they include tried and true time-saving tips. It’s amazing how much time one little trick can save you, especially when you use the trick over and over throughout the day.

So, here are my top five time-saving tips that I continue to rely on every day:

TIP #1: Organize Your Chrome Tabs

Let’s start with Tabs! I feel like the number of Tabs open on my computer at any one time can be a direct reflection of how much my brain is trying to do. It can get overwhelming without a system. Enter, Pinned Tabs.

Pinning Chrome tabs allows a user to organize tab utilization. When you pin a tab, a few things happen:

The tab narrows and moves to the left of your window
The “X” disappears so you can’t accidentally close a tab
Pinned tabs can only be rearranged within each other, and your group of pinned tabs stays furthest to the left

In order to pin a tab, you simply right-click on the tab and select “Pin.” In order to unpin a tab, you right-click on the tab again, and click “Unpin.”

While in the classroom, I always had my Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Classroom, Gradebook, and class website Pinned. In my position now, I continue to utilize pinned tabs, but they vary between projects and accounts. One thing is for sure, no matter what I’m working on, Gmail, Calendar, and Drive are always pinned.

TIP #2: Easily Access Your Most Important Tabs (Even if You Close Chrome)

Pinned tabs is always one of the most popular tips in my Google trainings, no matter the audience or specific focus of the training. The first question I always get after I demonstrate the skill is, “How do I keep my Pinned Tabs so they open every time I turn on my computer?” Notice how the question says turn on my computer. Yes, that means that we have to turn off our computer sometimes, actually often. Please don’t fall victim to thinking you can never turn off your computer in order to preserve your systems. This is not good for your device. Here are a few steps you can take so Chrome opens your pinned tabs every time you turn on your device and open Chrome:

Pin your tabs
Go into Chrome Settings (three dots next to your extensions/omnibox, then click “Settings”)
Scroll down to “On Startup”
Select “Continue where you left off”

The trick with this is to NOT close your Chrome window before turning off your device or quitting Chrome. You want Chrome to quit with your tabs open, so that when it reopens, it’s continuing from where you left off – tabs open.

I actually take this one step further. I am always working in at least 3 Google accounts, each in a different window on my computer (for more info on logging into Chrome with multiple accounts click here). I have my device set up to reopen all windows when I start my computer again, on top of choosing “continue where I left off” in all Chrome accounts. This way, when I shut my computer down, I leave all Chrome windows open (pinned tabs and all), so when I go to turn my computer on again, all of those windows will reopen with my tabs right where I left them. It’s a dream and a HUGE time saver for me. The way you complete this step varies, depending on what device you use, but I just wanted to be sure to mention it since it takes the time-saving to the next level.

TIP #3: Take Control …or Command

Don’t let the title of this tip confuse you too much. Most devices utilize the Control key. If you work on a Mac, however, you have a control key, but just to make things confusing, you’ll use the Command key instead of the Control key.

This simple little key can save you loads of time by creating keyboard shortcuts: combinations of keys that provide quick access to a particular function within a computer program. Much to my students’ dismay, I was not big into keyboard shortcuts. If I had a dime for every time I heard, “But Mrs. Christie, another way of getting there is to hold CONTROL plus…” Ha! I loved learning their systems – it was great to show there’s always more than one way to get somewhere in Google.

Even though I’m not an avid keyboard shortcut user, there are a few I could not live without. (If you are a Mac user, just substitute the Command key wherever you see Control):

CTRL C will copy highlighted text and CTRL V will paste the highlighted text (think of Velcro)
CTRL SHIFT V will paste your text to match the destination formatting. I am embarrassed to admit how long it took me to learn this one. I guess I didn’t know what I was missing until someone taught me. And if you think about it, the automatic formatting can save loads of clicks since it’ll change the font, size, color, etc. automatically. Try it. You’ll be amazed at how often you use this one!
CTRL X will cut text so that it’s deleted from the original location, and paste it in a new location once you hit CTRL V.
CTRL F will open a search box. This shortcut alone has saved me hours of time searching on the web. For example, I’m searching for how to do something online, and I come across a blog post. While I appreciate the author’s attempt to inform me on lots of content, I only have time for the one skill I’m in search of. I click CTRL F, type in my keywords, and then the search box will find those words throughout the page. I can use the arrows in the search box to jump from result to result quickly. CTRL F is an incredible time-saver, allowing you to find exactly what you need quickly.
CTRL P will allow you to print. And while printing can be handy in some situations, I use this shortcut the most for saving to Google Drive. Just change the destination from your printer to “Save to Google Drive.” This is super handy when trying to keep track of webpage content, for example, an order confirmation, receipt, etc.

TIP #4: Turn Gmail Into a Time-Saving Virtual Assistant

No matter the position, email is a huge part of what we do. If we can save bits of time whenever we email, this time can add up real quick.

One of my favorite, newer features of Gmail is the “Schedule Send” feature. You find this feature by clicking on the little sharktooth triangle next to “Send,” at the bottom of the compose window, and then choose the date and time you’d like your email to be sent.

This feature allows teachers to respond to an email whenever they read them, say 9pm at night, but not have the email go out until 8am the next day (or whatever date and time you choose). This helps teachers avoid setting the expectation that they are going to respond to emails all day and night.

TIP #5: Slash Grading Time in Half with Google Classroom

Google Classroom has come a long way since I was in the classroom. But I actually use Classroom as much as ever running our online courses. It is such a powerful tool, and Google is adding new features all the time. Because of its increasing capability, I’m sure if you asked your colleagues about their Google Classroom workflow, you’d find that we all are unique.

When grading in Classroom, I always add a private comment, for every student, in every assignment. And while some assignments require unique comments for each student, others allow for me to repeat comments. The comment bank in Google Classroom’s grading tool (read more here) is super helpful, but I have found that sometimes even just 3-4 clicks to insert a comment can add up, especially when working with many students. This leads me to my time-saving Google Classroom tip: send a private comment to multiple students at once. Here’s my flow for this:

I go through the students’ assignments in Classroom’s grading tool, one by one. If the student requires a unique comment, then I grade, comment, and return that student’s work from the assignment tool area.
For the students that meet the expectations for an assignment, I only enter their grade on this assignment page, no comment, yet.
Once I’ve gone through all student work, returning all assignments that required unique comments, I then head back to the Assignment student work page – the page where you can see all of the students’ assignments in one place – with the list of who has turned in, who’s still missing, and which have been graded. This is where the time-saving magic happens!
With one-click, I select all of the turned-in assignments (that all have drafted grades from my work in the assignment tool), and then hit “Return.” At the bottom of this pop-up box is an option for a private comment. I type the positive feedback, then click return, and Google repeats this private comment for each student AND returns all assignments…in one click!

At the end of the day, we only have so much time in a day, so why not free up as much as possible to spend it on what we love? In education, it can be extremely difficult to free up an entire day, afternoon, or even an hour of time. We have to be time scavengers, claiming minutes along the way, and if we’re deliberate, these minutes will add up to hours.

These 5 tips have been true game-changers for me, as a teacher and a trainer. Which will you try first? I’d love to hear how these tips work out for you. And please, share other time-saving tips you might have by commenting below!