I believe that branding can have a HUGE impact on how parents and community members think and feel about what is going on in our schools and classrooms. Branding is why I pay $4 for a cup of coffee with a Starbucks logo on the side over $1 at a gas station. That brand has come to mean quality (and also yummy flavors) to me – and I believe it is worth it. Isn’t that how we want our communities to see what we are doing as educators? As quality. As worthwhile!

One way that I brand the content I share from my school is by adding our school logo as often as possible.

Don’t have a school or class logo? I created our school’s logo using simple tools in Google Drawings! You can do it, too!

From Drive, navigate to:

• New
• More
• Google Drawings

Next, to create a simple logo, you can just layer in shapes and text!

Here’s an animation of me creating my own fictitious class logo using my favorite fonts, colors, a shape, and then simply layering the shapes.

I used the keyboard shortcut ctrl, shift, and the up and down arrows in order to move layers on top of or behind each other quickly.

You can even add in your Bitmoji or an icon you find online to personalize your logo even further. If your class is Johnson’s Dragons, for example, you probably want to include an image of a dragon – or your Bitmoji riding a dragon! I think I want this logo!!!

Once you’ve created your logo in Google Drawings, download it as a PNG. See animation below:

Downloading as a PNG ensures that you keep your logo’s transparent background. This keeps it from having a white box around the outside enabling you to layer your logo on pictures you take, slides, and documents to brand content as being from YOUR classroom or school.

Save the PNG you downloaded of your logo to your Google Drive so that you can add it to other files and images.

Then, save your PNG logo to your phone!

• Using the free Google Drive App, you can navigate to wherever you just saved your logo and then save it to your phone’s camera roll, or
• You could email the PNG logo to yourself and then open your email from your phone and save the image to your photos.

Once saved to your phone, I suggest finding your logo in your photos app and saving it to a logos file or album so that you can easily find it again even months from now rather than having to scroll back through all of your photos searching for it.

Now that it’s on your phone – you can take a picture, add your logo, and post to social media, email, or share with your community in seconds. Try my favorite apps for adding your logo easily: Canva, Pic Collage, and Adobe Spark.

Learn more by watching the youtube link of my presentation “Create Communication that Stands Out: Branding Your School or Classroom”.