One thing I like to do every year when I study electricity with my class is to take the time to teach them how to use drawing tools on a Google slide. Most have had very limited experience with this–but take to it quickly and use it often throughout the year.
As we have worked our way through our lessons on safety, how light bulbs work, conductors and insulators, and different types of circuits, we have been reading books and articles, taking notes in our interactive notebook, building circuits and testing out hypotheses–and I wanted to give them a technology connection to let them show some of what they have learned.
We reviewed the different types of circuits–and the point of “scientific drawings”–to convey information graphically with pictures, symbols, and labels. I showed students the following Google tools:
- Drawing shapes, changing color, changing line color and thickness
- Drawing different types of lines
- Creating and resizing and moving text boxes
- Selecting shapes and changing their size and rotating them
