Tech Tips: Embed Google Drawings for Instant Updates to Websites & Assignments

We begin each class with a warm-up activity--students write discussion board posts, reflections, or submit questions. Our learning management system, Canvas, makes it pretty easy to set-up...

But what happens if you need to make a quick change? Do you really need to update the assignment for every class?

No... And that is one of the big advantages of using and embedding Google Drawings in your online assignments and websites.

Google Drawings can be used to combine images and text in a variety of ways. In the example above, our students used primary sources--a Cold War propaganda poster (left) and a "Duck and Cover" photograph from the 1950s (right) to write a discussion board post about "The Red Scare".

Designing engaging graphics in Google Drawings is easy--think of it as the "best-of" Paint and PowerPoint with the best image and clip art database on planet Earth. I like to create a basic template with which to work and then "make a copy". This way, I can replicate ideas and plug-in new question prompts and images. 

See previous posts tagged GAFE to see examples: the PEEL paragraphs on writing about primary sources is an great starting point. I used one template to make a half dozen unique writing prompts, and posting a "view only" template enables students to take the idea and customize it with their own visual.

To help you to get started, I've posted a few how-to tutorials below. Using Google Drawings and the publishing tool is a true time-saver that enables revisions to be made and updated with no effort at all.

Check out this quick video on publishing a Google Drawing and embedding it on a discussion board or website.

Check out this video showing you how changes are automatically updated once a Google Drawing is embedded. No matter how many times you paste the code on a number of sites and assignments, you will never have to update the post. Any revision made to the Google Drawing is automatically recorded.

Think about all of the times that you "finish" a document, only to revise it thirteen times after "you're already done"... Okay--maybe that is my own personal OCD, but I can't be alone here!

At any rate, this makes it that much easier to make changes in one place and have the updates materialize everywhere. Now that's how we rapidly prototype in style!