Using Google Slides & Drawings to Make Interactive Notebooks

If you were using interactive notebooks in the spring of 2017, you probably remember the Great Glue Shortage. Somehow that spring making slime exploded onto the scene and glue was hard to come by. I know this because my son had 7th grade social studies that year with a rockstar teacher named Nikki Diehm. My son, who has hated crafts involving scissors and glue for his entire life, loved this class, and especially this teacher, and even seemed to embrace the making of the social studies interactive notebook. So when she asked everyone to help replenish the glue supply, he begged me to help get her some. The trouble was: there was no glue on store shelves anywhere. Because slime.

It was then that I first started thinking about digital interactive notebooks. As a high school teacher, glue is often a deal breaker for me. The getting it out, the everyone is sticky, the cleanup - these things make it not worth it for me. I do love the idea of interactive notebooks, though. My students have always really enjoyed using foldables and an interactive notebook seems like the place where you glue your foldable for instant notes + study tool.

Here is a sample I made. The background was created in Google Drawing. The blue rectangles are shapes I made in Slides and animated to disappear upon click.




Digital Interactive Notebooks are all over Pinterest; there are as many methods as people pinning them. Here are directions for my version:

1. Create a Google Slides deck as Interactive Notebook template.

2. Change size in Page Setup to 8.5” x 11”. Lots of people don't realize that slide size can be changed. See images below for tips to do this.

3. Create Google Drawing and change size in Page Setup to 8.5” x 11” (same as above). 

4. Create graphic organizer as Drawing. Download as JPG. 

5. Insert the Drawing JPG as Background on a Slide. This will keep the graphic organizer locked in place (unless students change the background of the slide).

6. Make copies for every student through Classroom or by providing the link. 

7. Kids create textboxes and shapes and add animations to make it interactive.

I want to be clear about a couple of things before I hit Publish. First, I probably wouldn't have thought about interactive notebooks in a digital way if it weren't for the fact that my son had an amazing teacher who he loved and who used them AND there was a glue shortage. I appreciate many things I have learned by listening to my kids talk about Nikki's classes. Second, I am a fan of Interactive Notebooks - digital, paper and glue, or otherwise. I'm not posting this because I think everything should be digital. In fact, I do not think that. 

If you try this or if this post was helpful, I hope you'll share that. Thanks for reading!