What is Canva?
Canva is a free, easy-to-use, online graphic design platform that offers many customizable design templates. Users can upgrade to the paid Canva Pro plan to access premium content
Canva for Education is a free upgrade for K-12 teachers and students. It provides all the premium features of Canva Pro, along with tools specifically designed for the classroom.
What can you create with Canva for Education?
Canva for Education isn’t just for making things “look pretty”; it’s a functional toolkit designed to help teachers manage their workload and create active learning experiences. From daily organization to student-led projects, here are a few examples of how you can use it to promote digitial competency alongside of your subject specific competencies!
Designing Infographics, Presentations, Calendars and Activities
Digital Competency Dimension: Producing content via digital technology
What: Use Canva’s enormous collection of templates and elements to create projects from scratch or customize existing works.
Did you know: You can create template links for students for various projects. This can help speed up the creation process.
Producing Multimodal Content
Digital Competency Dimension: Communicating via digital technology
What: Create multimodal content like videos, podcasts and websites to share ideas with a specific audience.
Did you know: If you are making a podcast, work on your cover image first. When it is done, group all of the elements together. This will simplify the production process!
Collaborative Brainstorming
Digital Competency Dimension: Collaborating via digital technology
What: Use whiteboards in Canva for real-time, whole-class brainstorming sessions.
Did you know: You can select multiple sticky notes and right-click to use Canva’s sorting tool to organize them in different ways!
Digital Competency and Canva
See the educator and student infographics below (accessible here as PDF) for inspiration of how to build Digital Competency using Canva.
Check with you School Board
The minimum age to use Canva directly is 13 years old. For students under 13, check with your school board’s RÉCIT consultant first and ensure you have the correct parental permission. Also, if your school board has a dashboard, it is possible that some Magic Tools (AI features) may be disabled for student accounts to ensure compliance with the School Board’s specific policies.
Want Canva Training?
Canva offers a wide selection of free, asynchronous online training through its Design School. You can quickly filter by audience to find trains for teachers or students. Please keep in mind that some student training may include Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools (referred to in Canva as “magic” tools) that may be enabled or disabled depending on your specific school board’s AI policies for students.
Canva’s New to Canva Youtube playlist also contains helpful video explinations and walkthroughs.
The LEARN Ped Team is also ready to help for FREE! Whether you have questions about how to navigate the Canva platform or want support designing activities that align with Québec-specific competencies. Just click this link to access our pedagogical support form. We will get back to you ASAP!