Build Flow Charts and Mind Maps with Diagrams

Diagrams activities give students a full-page canvas to lay thinking out in space — dragging shapes onto the canvas, labeling them, and drawing connectors between ideas. You set the activity up in the dashboard; students build on the canvas.

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Try it live

Pan and zoom a finished diagram of each type, exactly as a student sees it. Every example is a real activity in read-only mode, no account needed.

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The diagram types

One Diagrams activity is one of two types to start, chosen in the setup editor:

• Flow Chart — processes, decisions, and sequences. Drag process boxes, decision diamonds, start/end terminators, inputs and outputs, and connect them to show how one step leads to the next.
• Mind Map — branching ideas. Start from a central topic and radiate topics and sub-topics outward.

Venn Diagrams and Network Maps appear in the picker as coming soon and will unlock in a future update.

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Creating a Diagrams activity

1. Go to Activities → Create and pick the Diagrams tile. (Choosing a type is now an explicit step — nothing is pre-selected for you.)
2. Give it a title and link it to a classroom. The classroom link matters: students participate through their classroom enrollment.
3. On the activity page, open Diagram setup to choose the diagram type, toggle Logic Mode (flow charts only), set the grid, and choose who edits the diagram. Then open the canvas with Open canvas.

Setup choices save automatically as you work — the header shows the save status.

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Building on the canvas

Open the canvas in teacher mode to build the shared diagram:

• Add elements — open the Elements panel, choose a shape, then click the canvas to place it. Placement returns to selection mode after each element, so click a shape again to add another.
• Move and resize — drag an element to move it; drag its corner handles to resize (hold Shift to keep the proportions). Selected elements can also be nudged with the arrow keys.
• Connect — select an element and drag from one of its anchor points to another element. Connectors route around your shapes, and you can restyle any connector — width, line style, color, arrowheads, and route — from its properties panel or set defaults before you draw.
• Style — give elements a fill from the built-in palettes, and set text size, weight, and color per element.
• Zoom and pan — use the on-canvas controls to zoom, fit the whole diagram to view, or pan; toggle snap-to-grid in the setup.

Your work saves automatically as you go, and a manual save is always available.

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Logic Mode

Turn on Logic Mode in a flow chart’s setup to add a logic section to the Elements panel: AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR, and XNOR gates, plus Trigger, Condition, and Action blocks. It’s built for circuitry, electronics, and automation projects, where students diagram if-this-then-that behavior. (Diagrams stay pictorial — gates aren’t run or graded.)

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Google Drive blocks

From the Elements panel you can drop a linked Google Drive file or folder onto the canvas as a labeled block — a rubric, a reading, a template — so the reference sits right where students are working. Drive blocks are teacher-only: students see and can open them, but only you can add them. See Google Drive integration.

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Give each student their own diagram

Diagrams can be issued per student or by group on Plus and Premium, so each student (or each group, A–Z) builds their own copy instead of one shared diagram. Everything you draw on your own canvas becomes read-only reference material inside each student’s copy — a perfect way to hand out scaffolding or a starting template. From the activity’s roster you can open any student’s or group’s canvas to review their work. See Per-Student & Groups.

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Export and print

From the canvas header, download any diagram as an accessible PDF (server-generated and tagged, with a text outline of every element and connection for screen readers), save it as an image, or print an optimized view.

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Accessibility

The canvas is built to be used without a mouse: every element can be placed and moved from the keyboard, arrow keys nudge on the same grid the mouse snaps to, changes are announced to screen readers, and a View as list panel presents the whole diagram as a structured outline of elements and connections.