Have You Moved Over to the Google Side? Part 1

I am a geek and love Star Wars. 

I also love Google tools, so I decided to use the theme, "Are You Ready to Slide Over to the Google Side?" for my tech session on Google Slides. 

It was fun and best of all, I had teachers using the collaborative features and they LOVED them! Most had never used Google tools for collaboration. These tools are fantastic for all classrooms but I am finding so many incredible things that benefit our Foreign Language students! I will be sharing these in a series of posts since they will be filled with tons of engaging activities!

The first tool I want to talk about is Google Drawings. This is not just a "Paint" for Google. There is so much more to this program than meets the eye! The best part of Google Drawings is the ability to have more than one person work in the drawing at the same time. There are some fantastic ideas out there on the internet using Google Drawings, but these are some of my favorites:
Creating a Timeline:
When creating a timeline, your students must know the information as they must research whatever it is they are going to place on the timeline. If you have them in teams of 4-6, they can be responsible for certain events/periods. For example: A Walk Through History Timeline
You can assign students different Eras that you want them to cover and they are responsible for those sections of the Timeline. You can do one in Foreign Languages for Wars in Spain, or A timeline over Pablo Picasso's paintings/styles, etc. I did this one for a training session on Google Drawings in my district:

Another clever use of Google Drawings is to create your own graphic organizers in teams. You can actually "see" the thinking process as they can comment in the drawings and help one another. One graphic organizer we did in class was discuss a character from a Movie Talk we did (this example is done in English for the sake of all language teachers):

Sylvia Duckworth does a wonderful job with her SketchNotes. I encourage my students to draw the definitions of words as this helps them remember the words much better. You can check her SketchNotes here.

The kids really enjoy working with each other using these tools. I hope you will allow your students the opportunity to collaborate and create!