I'll be the first to admit that I have lots of "favorite" edtech tools that I believe should be in all teachers' toolboxes. One of those that makes my Top 5 List is Canva. Canva is a powerful, easy to use design platform that offers all premium features to K-12 educators and students FREE!
There are many benefits to using Canva. I think the most important are the amount of time teachers can save by utilizing the 1,000s of educational templates, the ability to create professional looking classroom decor, lessons, and learning activities, as well as the education specific features like creating classes, assigning full lessons, and providing feedback to students, quickly and easily. This post will provide a very basic overview of the Canva platform. If you're interested in a more comprehensive user guide, you'll definitely want to check out my Canva User Guide that's available in my TpT store.
Before you jump in and begin designing, you'll first want to create a free Canva account using your educational email address. This will allow you to instantly get verified as an educator and get access to all premium features for free. All of this can be done at https://www.canva.com/education/. If you already have a Canva account, you can upgrade the EDU account at this website as well. If you work within the realm of K-12 education but don't have a typical school email, you can get verified by providing a few documents. You can find all of the eligibility information here.
Once you have created your free educator account, you'll probably want to start by searching through the educational templates that are available. You can simply search by document type or topic using the search bar at the top, center or click "Templates" in the left side navigation bar. Some of my favorite types of educational templates to search for are:
Classroom Decor Kits
Lesson Plans
Lessons
Worksheets
Certificates (Use Bulk Create to save time! - Learn more about this in my comprehensive Canva User Guide for Educators)
Post Cards
Parent Letters
Bookmarks - Check out these interactive bookmarks I made!
Class Schedule (These would be great to help teach students executive functioning skills!)
Project Management
Graphic Organizers
Social Media
LMS Elements like:
Google Classroom Headers
Icons
Banners
Newsletters
Event Posters & Invitations
Infographics
Coloring Pages
In addition to the thousands of templates available for educators, you can also create designs from scratch. Canva provides design tools and elements, the ability to upload your own images, audio, and videos, a few text and draw tools, and hundreds of apps that provide extended abilities and features. Sad that Jamboard is going away? No worries, Canva has Whiteboards that allow you to provide live, collaborative spaces and these whiteboards have so many more features than Jamboard. You should definitely check them out. Some Whiteboard templates that may interest you include:
Mind Maps / Graphic Organizers
KWL
Writing Planners
Journals
Reflection Templates
You can have so much fun playing inside Canva!
As I mentioned earlier, there are education specific features available as well. As a teacher, you can create and share classes, develop organizational structures using folders inside the Projects tab, assign full lessons and designs, provide feedback to students, and connect to the following Learning Management Systems (LMS): Google Classroom, Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, Schoology, and D2L.
Here is a sample lesson I did with a group of high school students, focusing on the durable skill of Empathy. In this lesson, the students used a Canva template to interview a partner in order to learn what they needed to know to design the perfect phone home screen for them. I used Canva to create the lesson presentation, the interview template, and the phone home screen template. I then used the Folder to Lesson feature in Canva to turn these into a lesson. Students were able to access all lesson materials, complete the design assignment, and then submit directly back to me through Canva so that I could give them feedback. Everything was super seamless!!
Convinced to check out Canva to see how it can transform teaching and learning in your classroom? Don't stop here! Head to my TeachersPayTeachers store and purchase the Canva User Guide. This guide consists of 90 pages of step by step tutorials with screenshots, almost 2 hours of exclusive video tutorials, and links to advanced tips and tricks that you won't want to miss. You can find a sample of the User Guide here. I'd love to hear what you think, so please be sure to leave me a comment below about what you'd like to see on the blog in the future!
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