Excalidraw: A great tool for charts and diagrams

Over the summer I have been looking around the internet and through online articles for new tools that I can implement in my classroom next year. I am not a fan of tools that my students can only use at school, such as the Adobe Suite of tools most of my students don’t have access to these tools at home. I try to use open source programs so that students don’t have to pay for anything, but still can get work done outside of school if needed. I do like the vectors graphics program Inkscape, but this does have a learning curve with it. I teach technical classes and often need students to create flow charts or diagrams quickly and easily, Inkscape can do this but it requires more effort than is needed for the task. Through my exploration on YouTube one of the IT content creators Christian Lempa (YouTube Channel) showed a web based tool called Excalidraw.

Excalidraw is a simple light-weight tool that can run on just about any including Chromebooks and can create a variety of graphics including flow charts and diagrams. I really like this tool because it very intuitive to use and doesn’t require registration to use its basic functionality. At its core Excalidraw creates clean and simple drawings that can be used in variety of documents from technical write-ups to presentations to lab reports to mathematics explanations. The interface that Excalidraw uses is very straight forward and can be learned with little to no explanation by high school students, my high schooler at home was able to create a flow diagram in about five minutes with no explanation from me. All of the tools have icons that can be used to access them, but they also have keyboard shortcuts that are also shown on the icons themselves. Most of the major tools found in vector drawing programs are available, but it is been stripped down to the most essential tools that used to create. However this means that tools like a shape editor, node editor used to create custom shapes are missing. I am ok with this because the basic shapes that it allows are enough to create the charts and diagrams that for my decision-trees, flow charts and other basic diagrams works perfectly. My students have access to other tools for more advanced graphics that may need to be made. But I really like having a simple drawings tool to chart good looking charts and diagrams. Additionally, Excalidraw can pull in other graphics (I prefer them to have a transparent background) such as program icons or pre-made shapes, by simple uploading the files using the File menu. Finally, once the graphics are created they can be exported out in a PNG or SVG format. The PNG format can be pulled into almost any document authoring tool such as Word or Google Docs to add to the overall document’s informational value. Students could register if they would like to use the collaborative and library features, but this isn’t necessary to create high-quality good-looking graphics.

I think that Excalidraw is an excellent tool for creating simple diagrams and charts quickly and easily for student works of various types. I would recommend that you send the link to your IT department or administration for vetting before using it with students as this is a procedure that my and many districts require for using new tools with students. Over the summer can be a great time for this, since it may take your IT or admin times to complete the vetting. While you are waiting for this to happen you can create a simple tutorial video, though this wouldn’t necessarily be needed for order students to understand how to use the program, but it maybe for middle school students to use. I don’t think that I would use this program with student younger than middle school students, but that would be a professional decision that you have to make. I think that Excalidraw can be a great additional to the creation tools that I use with my students and is worth giving it a look and possibly adding to the tools that you with your students.

If you are interested in a deeper look at Excalidraw, please remember to join our mailing list and adding a comment about you what aspects you would like to know more about.