The best student templates for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Forms or Drawings can mean the difference between an easily produced masterpiece and an effort filled low-mark mess. These can be of tremendous help to teachers, who can share these templates to make the lives of their students easier – and ultimately the quality of work submitted, better.

If you have ever used Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Drawings, and Forms, then you know how easy it is to collaborate and share work with peers and students. Thousands of educators create and share best student templates as part of their lesson plans, activities, and projects, making these resources free through their blogs or on Twitter. 

Using templates saves you and your students a lot of time and stress. All you need to do is copy the template you want your students to use, edit and tweak the template as you like, then share the URL with your students so they copy it and complete the work.  

Below is a list of websites with tons of free templates, tips, and tricks.

• Google Classroom review
• How do I use Google Classroom?

Free Templates for Google

The following websites are filled with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings templates that are ready to use. Edit and tweak these templates as needed. 

You may want to share the activity with your students as a template so they can preview it. To do this copy the template’s long url and change the edit part in the URL, "/edit", to "/template/preview."

• Of course you can find several free templates I share regularly on this blog, Teacher Reboot Camp, in my books, and in my 400+ slide presentations.
• Eric Curts shares tons of templates for Drawings, Slides, Docs, and Sheets in his blog, Control Alt Achieve.
• Kelly Fitzgerald shares tons of Google tricks and templates, including several graphic organizers, in her blog, Edtech Nut.
• Brad Dale shares tips, tricks, and templates in his blog, Time to Talk Tech.
• Ms. Drasby’s Tech Babble is full of tips, tricks and templates.
• The TCEA blog is another great place to find tons of free templates, including Breakout Edu activity templates.
• The educators from Black Gold Regional School Division share tons of creative templates for students to create magazines, newspapers, and more!
• The Instructional Tech Talk blog has several templates, including awesome infographic templates for students.
• Flippity has tons of templates for Google Sheets! Create digital flashcards, interactive quizzes, scavenger hunts, and other cool stuff.
• Check out Slidesmania and Slidescarnival for some colorful themes and templates to make your presentations and lesson plans stand out.
• Pear Deck is an add-on for Google Slides to increase student engagement. The platform features a library of ready to use templates.
• The Google Teacher Tribe has several podcasts, tips, tricks and templates.
• Alice Keeler often shares tips and templates, especially for Sheets.
• Find templates for student choice menus and more at the Shake Up Learning blog.
• The Google Teacher Tribe has several podcasts, tips, tricks and templates.
• Twitter is another way I find tons of useful templates! I recommend these hashtags-#GoogleEDU, #GoogleClassroom, #GoogleET, and #GSuiteEdu.

Google Slides is an excellent tool not just for creating presentations, but for making eBooks, stop-motion animation, Choose Your Own Adventure stories, comic strips, and much more. However, one aspect that is a little lacking in Slides is the amount of design themes available by default.

When you create a Google slideshow you are given a simple list of 23 basic design themes to choose from. These control the colors, font choice, and overall style of the presentation. Although these are a great place to start, and work well for most presentations, what if you want a different look and feel? Certainly you can manually change the font face, font colors, background color or image, and more.

However as educators, the one thing we have less of than default design themes is time. Thankfully there are many websites that have created and shared hundreds of templates that can be used for your new Google Slides presentations.

In this blog post we will look at a wide range of online resources that provide over 600 design theme templates (as of last count) for you and your students to use in your creations. In most cases you will simply need to click on the templates provided and then make a copy for your own use. Once you have your copy, you can edit the slideshow however you want and add your own content.

1) Slides Carnival

https://www.slidescarnival.com/
Over 130 design theme templates. Each template has 25+ slides with a variety of layouts and designs.

2) Slides Mania

https://slidesmania.com/
134 design theme templates. Each template has a wide variety of layouts and designs. Many of the templates are for general use, but there are also a large amount of specialty templates including graphics organizers, manipulatives, school planner, back-to-school, school rewards, and more.

3) Google Slides PPT

http://googleslidesppt.com/
36 design theme templates. Each template has 30+ slides with a variety of layouts and designs.

4) Slides Go

https://slidesgo.com
145 design theme templates, including an entire category dedicated to education themes. Each template has multiple slides with a variety of layouts and designs.

5) Free Google Slides Templates

https://freegoogleslidestemplates.com/free-templates/
17 design theme templates. Each template has multiple slides with a variety of layouts and designs.

6) Slide Model

https://slidemodel.com/google-slides/
240 design theme templates. Many of these templates have fewer slides than some of the other sites, but with a wide variety there are many to choose from.

7) Mike MacFadden Templates

http://www.mmacfadden.com/templates/
21 design theme templates. These templates differ from the earlier examples because the layouts are saved in the slide master. After you make a copy of one of the templates, click the down arrow next to the "+" button (new slide button) to see and choose the layout you wish to insert.

8) Google's Template Gallery

https://docs.google.com/presentation/u/0/?ftv=1&tgif=c
26 design theme templates. In addition to the default themes that show up when you first create a slideshow, Google actually provides another 26 options in their template gallery. You can access these resources using the link above, or by going to Drive then clicking "New" then hovering over "Google Slides" and choosing "From a template".

These templates include examples such as Book Report, Flash Cards, Science Project, Photo Album, Portfolio, and more.

cross posted at www.controlaltachieve.com

Eric Curts is an education trainer and consultant with over 20 years' experience throughout the U.S. He is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator. Read his blog at www.controlaltachieve.com and follow him on Google+ and @ericcurts on Twitter.

I hope you enjoy the below three templates that have, and continue to, completely empower my teaching practice.

• Looking for a 5E lesson planning template that also addresses the Next Generation Science Standards? Click here for a template.
• Interested in using medical diagnosis as a curiosity spark in biology? Click here for a template. Click here for a student example.
• Do your students constantly create bad presentations? Click here for a rubric template that leverages a comical approach to teaching presentation skills.

cross posted at www.cyclesoflearning.com

Ramsey Musallam teaches science and robotics at Sonoma Academy in Santa Rosa, California, with the aim of fostering inquiry-based learning environments fueled by student curiosity. He presents widely on sparking student curiosity and teaching with technology. Musallam is a Google Certified Teacher, a YouTube Star Teacher, and a Leading Edge Certified Teacher. Watch his TED talk here and read his blog at www.cyclesoflearning.com.