How to Make an Animated Banner for Google Classroom
NOTE: Please watch the video for a visual of exactly how to follow these steps.
Most of the teachers are using Google Classroom right now because of pandemic and also because it makes it quite easy to share assignments, and content with students. However, the actual Google Classroom platform itself is kind of dull, blend and boring since it doesn’t allow a lot of customization. But still, there are plenty of things you can do to make your Google Classroom look visually engaging and student-friendly such as adding an animated classroom banner. Animated banners look more eye-catching than static ones and spice things up!
In this article, I’ll tell you how to create a top-notch animated banner for the Google Classroom to make it look less boring and increase your classroom productivity. There are many ways to design an animated banner but today I’ll show you how to make it with Canva.com as it allows you to do animations more easily.
Canva is the most user-friendly designing tool that is completely free to use and you can design pretty much anything you want. I’ll recommend you to get a Canva education account as it has more features than the free one and it’s kind of similar to a pro account. It allows you to make a sleek and professional-looking animated banner for Google Classroom in just a few simple steps. You can choose from a variety of layouts, fonts, and images to get the perfect dimension. Here’s how it works.
Launch Canva
To get started, go to Canva.com on your mobile or desktop and sign up with your Google or Facebook account.
Choose a Template
Next, type animated social media in the search bar at the top. Canva will show search results with tons of templates with different styles and themes. You can either choose from them or create your own custom template by clicking on “Create a blank animated social media”.
Customize your Template
The blank template will have a default square shape so to change it to fit the banner size click on the resize at the top, change the size to inches, type in 16x4 and click resize at the bottom. Canva will also give you some suggestions on the left side, and you can choose premade banners if you want.
The animated banners work like old stop-motion videos. You make a copy of each slide, customize different elements or add some movement in each one to give animation effect. Here’s how it works:
1. Select the images or characters you want to be moving on the banner.
2. Move your characters slightly off the screen to give an effect like they’re leaving the screen.
3. After moving them over a little bit, make a copy and then do it again.
4. Repeat the process about 6-10 times or until you get your desired results.
Change the Timer
Next, change the timer at the top and set all the slides to 0.2 seconds. Canva will turn all your template slides into an animated piece of art.
Click the play button at the top to test what your animated banner looks like.
Download the Banner
After you’re satisfied with the final look of the banner, click download at the top-right corner and select ‘GIF’ at the bottom, and press download. You can go back to Canva anytime and edit your design as many times as you want.
Upload the Banner to the Google Classroom
The uploading process is quite simple. Go to your Google Classroom and click “Upload Photo” on the bottom-right corner of the banner and select the GIF you’ve created. Resize the GIF to fit the entire banner by dragging the little squares up to the edges and select the class theme to finish uploading.
Bonus Tip
As a bonus tip, I’ll show you how to jazz up your Google Classroom look by customizing the font in the classroom tab. The normal text of the Google Classroom looks pretty boring and plain and it's a great idea to customize it with some cool fonts. Here are the steps to follow:
1. Go the coolfonts.org and type the text you want to convert.
2. Choose the desired font click copy. Go back to your Google Classroom and click on three little dots.
3. Next, select rename and past the font link, and again click rename.
4. To add emojis select the emoji keyboard online under the “Site Navigation” and copy the emoji you want.
5. Click rename, paste the link and then and click rename and that’s it, you’re done!
If you'd like to try Canva, feel free to use my referral link by clicking here!