Black History Project Idea - Sensory Figures in Google Drawings

Sensory figures is an interactive notebook assignment that I have seen used in Social Studies notebooks in the past.

They recently popped back up in my thoughts after having a conversation with another teacher about digitally presenting research that wouldn't take a long time to complete.

The idea hit at the perfect time for me because I am taking a Tony Vincent online course this winter. For our first week assignment we had to use some of the highlighted tools in Week 1 to make any graphic we wanted. I decided to flesh out the idea of a digital sensory figure, created in Google Drawings, to showcase student Black History research projects.

I used Google Drawings as the canvas, changing the dimensions to a printable format. I used Google search tools to find royalty free images. The pictures were uploaded to the site remove.bg to remove the backgrounds.The speech bubbles were created using the Google drawings shape tool and the curved font, around the arm of Martin Luther King, Jr. and dress of Elizabeth Keckley, was made on the site PicFont.

https://twitter.com/tonyvincent/status/1110859006682124288?s=20

Having made the first two (pictured above) as test cases I think it is doable with students grade 3 (with some modifications) and up. I would expect that the older the grade level the more meaningful and deep the "sensory dialogue" would become. My biggest concern is the multiple tech components. Students would have no problem finding a picture but using remove.bg, editing if necessary, downloading and uploading a picture to Google Drawings might be time consuming the first time. The speech bubbles and typing won't be difficult but creating the curved font would be (that could always be changed to a simple title though). This is all after students have read related biographical articles and synthesized the information into "sensory dialogue" (which might take some practice).

I am on a mission to try it with a class in February so stay tuned for a more realistic update 😉. If you wind up trying it before me, please let me know how it went either in the comments below or on Twitter, tagging me @atechcoachlife.

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