This month, our Google Certified Educator Level 1 Cohort has been focused on Google Drawings. I shared the following tips with our cohort and I thought they were useful enough to share with all of you. If you haven’t gotten to know Google Drawings, you’re missing out! Here is one of our archived webinars to get introduced.
Clone Your Shapes
To create a clone of your selected shape, hold down Control (Windows/Chromebook) or Option (Mac) and drag the shape. Voila! Shapes that are exact clones of one another.
This tip works with anything selected in your Drawing: lines, images, text boxes, etc.
You can use this tip to replicate the “infinite cloner” feature of Smart Notebook. Basically, you can take an image, clone it a number of times, and then stack the images on top of one another in the gray area of the document. Then students can drag the images into the canvas, just like in Notebook.
To quickly stack the images on top of one another, select them all, and then from the Arrange menu, choose to Align horizontally to the Center, and then Align vertically to the Middle.
As Frau Farbissina once said: Send In The CLONE!
BONUS TIP: Proportioned Shapes
To create a perfectly proportional shape, hold down the Shift key as you drag and draw your shape. No fussing with getting the shapes exactly right!
This tip also works when resizing existing objects or images. If you ever import a huge image and want to make it smaller, hold down Shift when dragging to resize. Your shape will retain its proportions.