Canva is a design platform that allows you to create a wide range of interactive media materials including infographics, posters, presentations, worksheets, comic strips, newsletters, book reports, cards, and many more.
Canva for Education is a Canva tool made specifically for teachers, students, and school districts. It offers all Canva pro features for free including tons of premium templates, royalty free images, premium icons and text fonts, background remover and many more.
Canva for Education offers a wide range of interesting features that make it a great design platform to use in your teaching. Both you and your students can start creating beautiful design work without the need for advanced graphic design knowledge.
You can simply choose a template from the site's library, customize it the way you want and share it with you students. Alternatively, you can create your template from scratch using Canva for Education editor.
You can also create a class on Canva for Education, invite you students in, and start creating and sharing assignments with them. The collaborative features in Canava enable your students to work on the same design template in real time while you monitor the whole creative process.
The pedagogical strengths of using a design platform such as Canva for Education are numerous and suffice it to mention a few including the ability for students to exercise multiple intelligences (e.g., spacial, linguistic, visual, etc), develop multimedia and digital literacy skills, practice using visual representation and symbolic language to communicate effectively, incorporate arts-based methods knowledge generation and analysis, enhance creative thinking skills, among others.
In this post, I introduce you to Canva for Education, share with you some of its interesting features, and show you how to use them. More specifically, the post covers the following points:
- Ways to use Canva for Education in your teaching
- Canva for Education teacher sign up
- How to create a class in Canva for Education
- How to add students to your class in Canva
- How to create and share assignments with students in Canva for Education?
- How to share collaborative assignments with students?
- Canva for Education tutorials and guides
- Ready-made templates
- How much does Canva for Education cost?
Ways to use Canva for Education in your teaching
There are different ways to use Canva for Education in your teaching. These include:
➥ Showcase learning
Students can create posters, infographics, or animated presentations to demonstrate the things they learned in a lesson or a curriculum unit.
➥ Storytelling projects
Students can use Canva for Education in digital storytelling projects. There are various storyboard templates students can start with. They can edit the boards, add images, text, voiceover, and even record and add videos to tell their stories.
➥ Educational comic strips
Canva hosts numerous professionally designed comic strips that are fully customizable. Use these materials to design your own comic strips to share with students. You can, for instance, create strips to generate discussions around a particular topic, or use them as prompts for digital storytelling projects and more.
➥ Timelines
Students can use Canva templates to create timelines chronicling the chronological developments of events, document major historical happenings, outline procedural stages of a particular phenomenon, document the life of a popular or historical figure, and more.
➥ Visual analytical reports
You and your students can use Canva to create analytic reports for , for instance, books, short stories, YouTube videos, movies, etc. The key here is for students to visualize their thinking processes as they engage with visual creation.
➥ Animated presentations
Canva is a great free alternative to Google Slides and PowerPoint. Students can use it to create visually attractive presentations embedding all sorts of interactive media including animated stickers, flashy fonts, GIFs, videos and more.
➥ Create and share assignments
Teachers can use Canva for Education to create a wide variety of individual and collaborative assignments and share them with students directly from Canva interface or using an integrated learning management system (see how to create assignment below).
➥ Video projects
Students can use video templates in Canva for Education in a wide variety of educational activities including to create 'about me' video projects, short educational documentaries, and more.
➥ Create collaborative design work
Group projects templates in Canva for Education are a great tool to enhance students teamwork and boost classroom community. Students can work on the same design template (e.g., a poster, a whiteboard, an infographic, a presentation, etc) in real time. They can drag and drop elements, insert images, add text and more. As a teacher, you get to monitor the whole creative process and view students thinking process as it takes place. You can even intervene and send individualized feedback to specific students.
Canva for Education teacher sign up
To sign up to Canva for Education as an individual teacher, head over to Canva.com/edu, click on 'Sign up' and validate your teaching credentials. Once validated, you will get access to all the pro features provided by Canva.
How to create a class in Canva for Education
Creating a class in Canva for Education will enable you to create and share assignments with your students. To create a class:
- Log in to your Canva for Education account
- Click on the settings cog
- Click on Billing and Teams
- Select Create a new class.
Once your class is created click on its name on the left side bar to access it. From there you can start customizing it the way you want.
How to add students to your class in Canva
After you created a class, you can start adding students to it. To do so, click on the class name from the left side bar to open your class. Next, click on 'People' tab and choose one of the two options: import class roster from Google Classroom or enter students names manually. Whichever option you choose, students will not able to register to Canva for Education until they click on the invitation link you sent them.
How to create and share assignments with students in Canva for Education?
Use Canva for Education to create assignments based on design templates of your choice. Build a template from scratch or use a pre-made one, customize it, and add your input. When the assignment is ready, click on the the three dots menu at the top right corner and choose whether you want to send it directly through Canva or through your learning management system (e.g., Google Classroom).
To share an assignment directly through Canva, choose Assignment, give your assignment a title and write a short description (e.g., include specific instructions for students). Next, Select your class and click publish. The assignment will now be displayed in students accounts under their course dashboard.
Students can work on the assignment without leaving Canva interface and when they are done, they can share it with you (the teacher) using the Send button from the top right corner. They can write their message or feedback and click on Send to turn their assignment in.
As a teacher, you will be able to access the assignments students turned in by clicking on Classwork tab from the left side bar and from there you can leave feedback for students.
How to share collaborative assignments with students?
You can allow students to work together on a single document by sharing it with them. Here is how to do it: open the template you want students to work on collaboratively and click on the Share button. Copy the link of the document and share it with your student via email or any other way you want.
When students click on the link they will be able to access the template and start contributing in the same time. As a teacher, you will able to see what each student is contributing, and you can even provide individualized feedback to help them with their design work.
Canva for Education tutorials and guides
Canva has an entire section called Learn where you can access a wide range of tutorials and guides to help you learn how to create beautiful design work. For instance, start with the graphic design basics course to learn about things such as proximity of graphic design, fonts, color wheel basics, tints and shades, color combinations, elements alignments and many more.
Ready-made templates
Canva for Education provides access to over 60.000 educational ready-made and fully customizable templates created by teachers for teachers. Many of these materials (e.g., worksheets) are created according to content standards and are organized by grade level and subject.
Educational templates include lesson plans, worksheets, virtual backgrounds, infographics, book reports, lesson plan outlines, parents and school announcements, newsletters, graphs, virtual classroom kits (with Zoom backgrounds, Google Classroom headers, etc), group work activities, social emotional learning activities, students video templates, banners for your social media profiles and learning management system, and more.
Alternatively you can create a design template from scratch using Canva editor. Simply click on Blank canva and start building your visual. You can add various elements including text boxes, fonts, images (from Canva library or import yours), animated stickers, icons, GIFs, logos, and more.
How much does Canva for Education cost?
As of writing these lines, Canva for Education is totally free for teachers and school districts. All you need to do is sign up as a teacher and validate your teacher credentials.
More sources:
Get Creative with Canva for Teacher (this is an excellent video tutorial on how to use Canva for Education, created by New EdTech Classroom).
Getting started with Canva for Education (Join Jason Willmot, head of Canva for Education, and George Lee, teacher, as they discuss Canva for Education. Jason explains the set up process and George provides practical examples of how he uses Canva with his students).
What it’s like to be a Canva for Education Creator (article by Canva)
