I learnt something new yesterday!

I usually like to think I'm pretty savvy when it comes to using the Google Apps for Education suite, but yesterday my year 7 class taught me something that I didn't know you could do! I had always wanted my students to be able to create or label a diagram collaboratively but wasn't sure how to do it... and yesterday I saw two of my girls doing it without any prompting!!

How you may ask? Or maybe you aren't because you already knew this... but for me it was like a lightning bolt moment! It is as easy as creating a new Google Drawing and sharing it with people and allowing editing rights... that's it... I really don't know why I didn't think of it before!!!

So this is what the girls were working on yesterday when I found this little gem by peeking over their shoulder... they needed to create a flowchart showing the process of fossilisation and they decided to work together on this.

It was perfect timing as today I wanted my Year 9 class to map out the 20 worst earthquakes in history on a map of the world with visible tectonic plates. Because it was period 4, I was happy for them to work together - so I showed them how to create their new Google Drawing, share it with their partner and work on it together in real time!! It really was lots of fun.

Here is one group's map while they were all working on it at the same time...

Very exciting and I can't wait to work out where else I can use this in my classrooms!