Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Drawings Tutorial”.
In this tutorial, we’re gon na look at one of the kinds of documents that you can create in Google Drive, and it’s one that I think gets overlooked very often and goes unused really by most people and what is it? It is Google drawings. So if you click here on new, you can create a folder. You can create a Google Doc, a Google sheet etc and a Google Form. And if you haven’t seen my video tutorials on Google Drive, I would recommend that you watch that to learn about Google Drive and these types of documents that you can create in Google Drive. Also, I have tutorials about Google Forms and how it works. But in this tutorial, let’s focus on Google drawings, so I’m gon na go ahead and click on that to open up the Google drawings interface, and it gives me a blank canvas with which to work and a few tools here in the upper left corner and Google Drawings is just what it sounds like it’s for making drawings, you’ll notice here in the upper left.
The title of this drawing is untitled, so I’m gon na click on that and I’m gon na call. This rose. Okay, I’m gon na be very ambitious and hope to draw a rose here so now that I’ve named that, of course, I could put it in a folder and sometimes it’s better just to create a folder go to the folder and then from inside the folder create A new drawing or a new document, and that would automatically file it where you want it to go, but I can also do that here from inside Google drawings and I could create a new folder I’ll. Just call this drawing practice, click the check mark and move here, and so this drawing now is inside a folder called drawing practice. Okay, so I’m about to attempt to draw a rose using the tools that are here. The first thing that you should be aware of when using Google drawings is that you’re not limited to using just this canvas that you’re given this is the default size, but you can go to the lower right corner click and drag to make a much smaller image. Now notice what happened? I made it smaller and then everything got zoomed in based on the new, smaller canvas.
So because of that, it’s hard to tell that it really worked. But it did and as you can see this time when I’m less wide, that made it more obvious that I had changed the drawing dimensions. Okay, so this is more like what I’m looking for.
I’M gon na create a drawing that fits basically in these dimensions. I might need to stretch it out a little bit more make it taller, but that’s gon na serve me pretty well for what I want to do. Okay, so next I’m gon na go here to the upper left and I can use some of these tools to create my drawing so I’m gon na go here to line and you’ll notice that there are straight lines.
There are also curved lines, scribbles and so forth. So I’m gon na start with a scribble and let’s see how I do here, I’m gon na try to draw a rose now. You’Ll notice that google drawings is kind of helping me out. My lines are really not quite that smooth, but Google drawings is helping me to make this look a little better than I normally could do. So. That’S that’s nice. So there’s some smoothing going on and I could continue to draw this rose the best I can just using the scribble tool, I’m actually fairly happy with how this is turning out at this point. But now, of course I could go in and change it to. Let’S say a line and I can just click and then the line appears and then I can drag one end of the line to put it where I want it to be now. Another way to do that is just to click once hold the click and then drag the line where you want it to be. Okay. Now that’s a pretty thick stem for this rose, so I’m gon na click here on the arrow tool, select the line and bring it in a little bit to make it a little more narrow, okay, great it might look a little too straight actually, but I’m pretty Happy with that now we also have some shapes here. Some generic shapes, you can click on the top option there for shapes, and you can see there’s all sorts of shapes that you can use in your drawings. Okay, I would like to use this triangle, so I just click on triangle and then click on the screen, and it produces a triangle that I can use.
I can also manipulate it. I can make it more narrow, more wide, whatever I need to do notice that there’s also that little circle that extended above the shape that I just put in, I can click on that and rotate to tilt the shape. Ok, so that’ll serve as a thorn. I suppose, for my drawing also in shapes, we have arrows that we can bring in there’s call-outs.
These are great for cartooning and comics, and things like that for students to use or teachers and there’s also math equations symbols that you can pull in and use. Okay. Now at this point I would like to add some color everything’s, just so black and white right now, so I’m gon na click here on a part of my Rose and notice that I get additional tools.
Okay, first of all, I could change the line weight to make it thicker. If I would like to in this case that doesn’t really match what I want to do. So I’m gon na undo that I can also go here where it says line color and I can set that to be another color okay, so I could go in and make these lines red to help with my rows now. I could continue to do that. Of course, but let me point out that if you choose a shape, the nice thing about choosing an actual shape here or choosing a polygon is that when you create the shape or polygon, it can be easily filled. So I can put the fill color.
I can also go and select the line color or the border color, and so that’s something to be aware of if you create an actual shape, with no gaps in the drawing it’s a little easier to use the fill to color the entire shape. Now, once you have that shape notice that you can extend it, you can adjust it and things like that. Another thing that I can add to my Google drawing here is text, so I can click the text box, click on the screen and then type in the text that I want to be in my drawing okay and then I can drag that where I want it To be, I should probably stretch out that text box so that it encompasses the entire word and then I can move that wherever I want it to be.
So I know this is kind of a crude drawing not the best and I haven’t filled in all of the color. But I want to move on and point out that not only is Google drawings for creating doodles and drawings like this, but it’s also fantastic for things like graphic organizers for students, mind maps, org, charts and things like that. So, for example, a student or a teacher could go in and very easily create a Venn diagram, which is a common graphic organizer that teachers use or they could create a KWL chart or a cause-and-effect chart, all sorts of different graphic, organizer type images. So let me just quickly show you how I could create a Venn diagram.
I selected the shapes options, went to shapes and picked circle and I’ll do that again create a second circle and it’s gon na overlap. The first now I’m having trouble making that a perfect circle, a little-known trick that can help with that is, if you hold the shift key, it forces the dimensions to be perfectly equal and that helps you to make a circle. So I’ve got these two circles that overlap and that’s a nice Venn diagram now for Venn diagrams. It helps to have transparent, fill colors. So I can just change that here with the paint bucket tool make it transparent, make the other one transparent, and there I’ve got my nice Venn diagram.
Of course you could go in and use the text box to label them. So, let’s say in a Spanish class, for example: maybe the teacher wants the students to compare and contrast Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, so I’ve typed in Don Quixote. Now I can copy that and paste it put it above the second bin diagram and put in Sancho Panza and arrange those the way I want them to be, and there’s a nice Venn diagram for my students to use a few other quick little tips to share With you include lines, when you create a line, let’s say it’s an arrow: you can go down and notice that there’s these circles that appear, if you click on one of those circles and if you hold the click it will allow you to create an arrow from That point that can connect to any other circle, so I could draw an arrow there from point A to point B notice that the arrowhead is tiny.
There are some things you can do to fix that you could go here as long as the arrow is selected. You can go up here, change the weight of the line that makes the Arrowhead a lot more visible. You can also go up here where it has the arrowhead and you can click on it and change the style of the arrowhead okay.
So it could be a little different style if you would like it to be okay and it doesn’t have to be filled in in black. Of course, I could change the color of the arrow and more. There are other options as well in this case.
Of course, the arrow doesn’t really make sense as part of my drawing, so I’m going to undo that and go back. So the point of this is that you can use the Google drawings to draw up whatever you need to do and use these tools that you have available to you in Google draw now in some ways. This reminds me of lucidchart.
Some of you have seen my video tutorial on lucid chart. If you haven’t, you should watch it. A lot of these tools are very, very similar to lucid, chart and similar to lucid chart.
It is possible to create hot spots in your Google drawings. So, for example, I could go over here and insert a shape, let’s say a rectangle, so I select the rectangle and then I click and drag to outline the area that I would like to become a hotspot now, of course, by doing that, I can’t see the Word, Quixote anymore, so to fix that I can just go up here: change the fill color to transparent and if I want to, I could change the line color to transparent. Also, that’s now an invisible box.
But if I click on the box again, I could go up here to link and you can also go to insert link. But anyway, you click on the link put in the URL to a website and I’m gon na grab this URL for the Wikipedia article on Don Quixote. By the way, this is the way you spell it in Spanish, and so I’m gon na paste in that link. Click apply, and so now anytime, a student clicks inside that hot spot that I’ve created it will pop up with this URL that can be clicked to take them to the website. So it’s kind of like creating a hotspot, as you can in lucidchart, not quite the same but pretty similar.
The final aspect of this that you really need to know, I think, is that you can now go to edit and then choose web clipboard, and you can copy this entire drawing to web clipboard. Now, when you do that, it will make this drawing available inside Google, Docs, Google, slides and so forth. So, for example, I’m gon na go to new Google Docs and open up a Google document. Okay, let’s say I wish I had that Venn diagram.
I can just go here to edit web clipboard and there’s the drawing. I can click on that and it will paste it in. So that’s awesome, that’s the good news. Let me give you the bad news. I found out recently that Google is planning to remove this feature of the web clipboard anyway. I wish Google would keep this feature.
I think it’s fantastic. You can go here to web clipboard, help to learn more about it and hopefully I’m wrong, but I did hear that this is a feature that Google is planning to take away from us as they do from time to time, but enjoy it. While you can. So what a nice thing to be able to create a drawing or a graphic of some kind that you might want to use over and over and then to be able to pull it in to your Docs.
Your slides and things like that, and my last point that I want to point out, is that even if you never even open Google drawings, these same skills, these same tools, many of them, are available inside of Google slides. So I’m gon na click here on new Google slides just to point out that you’ll get some of those same Google drawing options here inside of Google slides and so everything that I’ve taught you already in Google drawings should transfer over and be doable and usable. Inside of a Google slides presentation, okay, there’s the line with all the same line options, the line thickness and so forth. You can even insert a hotspot or a link, just like I showed in Google drawings, so I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning about Google drawings. I think it’s a really nice tool. It’S a part of Google Drive that isn’t used as much as I think it should be now before I end, I really should point out that, after you do name your drawings and so forth, you can go here to the upper left like file and you can Download your drawing, if you would like to as a PDF as a PNG as a JPEG or some other options here, and so these graphics that you make online can be downloaded and turned into photos and images on your actual computer.
Okay. So that’s a file that I can use. I could use it in any program on my computer, so thanks for watching – and I hope you’ll consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and please do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students And watch for a new video, at least every Monday, .