In my daily work with 7th-12th grade students and many different teachers and support staff, I often see people trying to make applications do things for them that they are not designed to do. One of the most common things I see is that people try to use Google Docs (because it's what they're familiar with) for graphic design applications. They spend more time trying to align text, move images, etc., than they do working on their content.
The simple solution for this problem is to use Google Slides or Google Drawings for simple publishing activities. It's easy to customize the size of both Slides and Drawings using the Page Setup feature to make the canvas 8.5 by 11 inches. From there, it's a matter of adding whatever content is relevant to the activity or project and publishing as needed. Both applications allow for interactivity such as hyperlinks to external content (and Slides even provides easy video embedding from YouTube or Drive). Sharing is simple, downloading in different file formats (PDF, JPEG, etc.) is a snap, and users can even publish to the web as if creating a mini-webpage.
Check out this very simple overview to get started.
Classroom Applications: Our schools use Chromebooks in many classrooms, so whenever we can utilize the free G-Suite applications to meet the needs of students and staff, we take advantage of what we have available at our fingertips.
- Create your own infographics
- Design newsletters
- Create unique graphics for websites
- Design your own book covers for book reports
- the options are unlimited!
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