Venn diagram examples and teaching strategies that work
What is a Venn diagram?
Though we have probably all used Venn diagrams for visualizing comparisons in a variety of settings — at school, at work, or at home — you may be wondering: just what is a Venn diagram? Invented by the mathematician John Venn in the 1880s, this common graphic organizer is useful as a compare-and-contrast diagram that helps people visualize information and concepts in a clear and concise manner. This type of diagram is easy for users to understand, while also being easy to create.
Why is learning Venn diagrams important?
There are many benefits to using Venn diagrams in your classroom. For teachers, Venn diagrams can help you quickly and effectively communicate differences and similarities, provide a simple visual aid for a lesson, or distinguish between multiple concepts or ideas. When students create Venn diagrams, they are better able to make decisions, reason through logic, and detect patterns in data when they use tools like Venn diagrams to support their thinking. At a broader level, Venn diagrams can be a very effective tool to help students organize information visually, better understand the relationships and overlaps between items or groups, and develop a plan for a project.
Venn diagram teaching strategies
If you’re wondering what Venn diagrams are used for, and what the benefits are of using a Venn diagram in your classroom, just think about how frequently students practice comparing and contrasting items, concepts, or events. Venn diagrams can support many different teaching styles as well as different academic subjects and topics. In a math class, students might use Venn diagrams to differentiate geometry concepts or to show the relationship between sets of equations. Venn diagrams can be used in social science or history classes to compare and contrast different political ideologies, national identities, or historical periods. Humanities educators could ask students to utilize Venn diagrams in diagramming characters from literature, or to put the work of different authors head-to-head. For science classrooms, students could be asked to Venn diagram mitosis and meiosis, types of rocks, elementary particles, or other important core concepts.
Make it personal
One of the major difficulties teachers face in preparing for class is creating materials — even simple ones like Venn diagrams! Luckily, Adobe Express has lots of templates to help you create beautiful classroom materials, handouts, visual aids, and assignments. Adobe Express templates are great for Venn diagrams — even better than common online Venn diagram makers — because it takes all the hard or tedious parts of material creation out of the equation, and also gives you a variety of exciting tools for making your Venn diagram beautiful. For teachers, this allows you to focus on preparing for class, while students love how easy it is to get started creating right away. Adobe Express Venn diagram templates are designed to be ready to use as soon as you login, with easy quick actions, a huge library of EDU-specific design assets like fonts and icons, cool image editing tools, and more. No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s easy to create a beautiful Venn diagram using Adobe Express.
Customize your Venn diagram template today!
If you’re wondering how to make a Venn diagram, check out this template:
Browse through this collection of Venn diagram examples with plenty of colorful and educational options you can make your own.
Want to keep learning? Check out my self-paced Lightning Learning course on the Adobe Education Exchange to learn more about how to use graphic organizers in your classroom!
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- Max Suechting
Doctoral candidate at Stanford University and the K-12 Content Lead for the Adobe Education Exchange. See his helpful Adobe for Education videos.