Month: November 2015

Using Your Own Google Drawings as Images in a Google Doc

From time to time, we all have wanted to include an image or picture of something in a Google Document. Google has made it very easy to make this happen.

  • Drag and drop an image anywhere on the Google Document
  • Insert an image by URL
  • Search ‘free to use’ images from Life and Stock Images databases
There are three ways to include a Google Drawing you have made in your Google Document. The most obvious method is just taking a screen shot of the final version of the Google Drawing and inserting it in the Google Document. The only disadvantage of this would be if an edit was made to the drawing after the screenshot was taken. An updated screenshot would then have to be inserted on the Google Document.

Below are two different ways an ‘always current’ Google Drawing can be included in a Google Document.

Inserting a ‘Non-Existing’ Google Drawing
STEP 1:
Place your curser where you would like to create your Google Drawing. Then select Drawing under the Insert menu.
STEP 2:
A drawing pop up window will appear for you to add your content. Once you are done, you will then hit the Save & Close button. It is important to know that a separate Google Drawing file will not be created since you are making this ‘drawing’ in the Google Document. You also cannot grab a pre-existing Google Drawing this way.
**NOTE: You are able to made edits to your drawing after you have saved it to the Google Document. To do this, double click on the drawing and the popup window will reappear.

Inserting a ‘Live’ Pre-Made Google Drawing

STEP 1:
Open the Google Drawing that you want to include in your Google Document. Then select, Publish to the Web under the File menu.

STEP 2:
Select the blue Publish button. This will provide a link that will be available for anyone in the world to view.
** NOTE: You do have the ability to restrict who can see this information under the Published content & settings drop down menu at the bottom of that window.
STEP 3:
Copy the provided link.
** NOTE: You have the ability to stop publishing your file, however if you ever choose to do this, you would loose the linked Google Drawing in your Google Doc.
STEP 4:
Select Image under the Insert menu and paste the link to the Google Drawing. Your drawing will then be embedded in your Google Document.
As always, if you ever have any questions – you know where to find me. Happy Drawing…

Polling Students through Google Slides

Receiving formative feedback can be very helpful. There are many tools out there that help get that feedback, whether you use Kahoot!, Quizizz, Socrative, or Peardeck (to name a few).

Just recently, Poll Everywhere came out with a Chrome extension that allows Google Slide users the ability to embed Poll Everywhere questions right in a presentation.

I can see this being very useful when you know you want to ask your students a very quick question but don’t want to spend the time to add the presentation in a Peardeck or Kahoot! Poll Everywhere does have a free educator account (which is great) but only limits you to 40 responses per question. So, those of you who have class sizes higher than that would not be able to use this tool.

So the next time you have that moment of ‘I want to quickly add a question or two to a google slide presentation’ give Poll Everywhere a try.

STEP 1:
Get the Poll Everywhere Chrome extension. The actual official title of this Chrome extension is: Polling in Google Slides (This chrome extension has already been pushed to the staff in my district).

It is important to note that you will not ‘see’ the chrome extension with the rest of the extensions in the Chrome browser. Instead, a new menu option will show up when you have a Google Slide opened on your screen.

STEP 2:
Go to Poll Everywhere and sign up for the free K-12 Educational Plan. Click HERE for the direct link.

STEP 3:
Open up a Google Slide presentation that you would like to include a question or two in your presentation. You will notice the new menu option: Poll Everywhere.

STEP 4:
Log in to your Poll Everywhere account.

STEP 5:
Then select Create Poll. A pop up window will appear for you to choose the type of question. Once you hit insert poll, it will automatically insert a slide with that poll question on it.

Important to Note: The actual poll question will not show until you are in present mode of your slide presentation. While in editing mode, you will see the following:

If you have any questions on how you can use this extension or you need assistance making this work for you, just let me know.