Does Discovery Education Have Themes And Templates

Equally teachers, we want our students to be engaged. We work to make content interesting and organized. And depending on your style, y'all may or may not spend the fourth dimension to make your content visually appealing for students. After all, there'southward not enough fourth dimension in the day, right? But at that place are a few simple things you tin do to brighten upwardly and personalize your content by creating a class theme. And with the right approach, yous tin can reuse this theme throughout the entire year.

Today, I am going to show you how to create a custom theme for Google Classroom. Classroom has some nice themes, but sometimes you want something original, something that is meaningful to you and your students. Your Classroom theme can get a hook where the appointment starts. But it might be a little tricky figuring this all out on your own, and so I'm here to guide you, step-by-stride. And what'southward crawly is that nosotros will be using all gratis, simple to use tools. You do NOT need a graphic design background for this, promise.

You might be wondering what I mean by Classroom "theme." The theme is just the header paradigm for your class. It appears on the Stream page.

You lot can e'er select one of the themes Google has provided past clicking "Select theme." We're looking at creating a unique theme today, so we're going to focus on uploading a photo instead. But first, we have to create this photo. And today, we are going to use one of my accented favorite tools (and totally underrated, in my opinion): Google Drawings.

STEP 1: Create a New Drawing

Head on over to a new Google Drawing by post-obit these steps:

Go to Google Drive
Click New
Hover over More
Click Google Drawings
Title your Drawing

Step 2: Customize your Drawing

You want your image to exist the size of the Google Classroom banner. The prissy thing almost Google Drawings is that you can easily change the size to whatever dimensions you'd like by following these steps:

Click File
Curl downward to Folio Setup
Change the dimensions to pixels
A Google Classroom banner is 1,000 10 250 pixels – here is a template you tin employ with the right dimensions already set. If you're interested in measuring spaces online, check out the PageRulr Chrome Extension .

Once your Drawing size is set, the world is your canvas. You can alter the background color, insert text boxes, shapes, images, and and so on. You can acquire more than about what's possible in Google Drawings here . If you take a form logo, this would exist a great place to display it. Something I loved to do as a teacher was to have the students create their own, personalized logo using Google Drawing. These logos could exist used as safe contour pictures (every bit long as they didn't use their picture or location) for their online accounts. I idea for a Google Classroom custom theme is to have all of the student logos on the grade banner, sort of as a mosaic. Seeing their own logos displayed together in the Classroom banner can instantly give the students a feeling of buying and unity.

Step 3: Save your Drawing

Once yous have your Drawing complete, you lot'll want to download it as an paradigm file. In social club to do this, yous'll follow these steps:

Click File
Hover over Download
Select jpeg or png

Step 4: Add your Drawing to Google Classroom

And so you'll head over to Classroom to upload your image – be sure you're on your Stream folio. To upload the personalized prototype to Classroom, you'll follow these steps:

In the lesser-correct corner of the banner, click Upload Photo
Find the photo on your device (in Downloads)
Rearrange, center, ingather, or aggrandize the paradigm so it looks the manner you'd similar
Click insert

And viola! You lot have a personalized custom theme in Google Classroom. It may seem small, but the appointment and ownership this imprint can create will get a long fashion with your students. Something else that's pretty cool is that you can reuse this banner in other Google tools. It'll fit swell as a page header in Google Sites and Forms, or every bit an image in Slides and Drawings (or any other tool, for that affair). When used across multiple online settings, you're now creating familiarity for your students, in addition to the ownership and engagement. All with one personalized image.

Then there you have information technology – four steps that volition help you create a custom theme for your class. What other ideas do you take that would help others create engaging custom themes for their grade? Please share below!

More of a visual person? Click here to sentry our footstep-past-step video on how to create a custom theme in Google Classroom.

As Director of Education Partnerships at EdTechTeam, Christina brings a passion for rethinking educational activity to ensure experiences are learner-centered, with a focus on developing the capacity of others to lead and implement transformational work. Christina has worked in various roles in elementary, middle, and high school environments, as Acquaintance Manager of the Institute for Personalized Learning, and as a Manager of Partnerships at Discovery Education. She uses her feel equally a classroom instructor, instructional coach, principal, and professional evolution specialist to sympathize the challenges districts face, and partners with them to create a design that works toward the district'southward vision and goals. From Design Thinking to STEM to apprenticeship experiences, Christina is always looking for ways to farther empower educators and engage learners in real-life experiences that bear on their futurity.