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What Is Canva And How Does It Work? Tips & Tricks by zainsardarcracks
It's a free tool that allows students and teachers to work on photo editing, design layouts, and more, all within an easy-to-use platform.
What is Canva?
Canva (opens in a new tab) is a graphic design tool that simplifies the digital design process. As such, creating an account is easy and everything works either through a web browser or in the iOS or Android apps.
Canva enables image editing and project-based learning with a simple drag-and-drop interface that works well even for younger students. From brainstorming as group work to individual project creation, it has many potential uses in the classroom.
With more than 250,000 templates available, it's very easy to get started and move forward with the topic, even for those new to the platform. Stock photos, videos and graphics are also available, with thousands of options to choose from. All those numbers go up even more if you pay, but more on that below.
How does Canva work?
Signing up for Canva is easy, using either an email, Google account or Facebook login. Once an account is created, for free, you can choose whether you're using it as a teacher, student, or anything else. This will tailor the experience to your needs, making it easier to find.
Teaching how to use Canva can be the focus of lessons aimed at expanding the digital skills available to students. But since this is very easy to use, it will take very little time. How deep learning and creativity can flourish by letting students play with options.
Making a poster, for example, will start by offering templates down the left, then the main image on the right that you can customize. Clicking into this will make a toolbar appear with options to edit – this reacting as you work keeps things minimal and clear throughout.
You can upload your own images and videos, which is ideal when working on a smartphone using the app version. Once completed, you can download the file, share it via lots of social media optimized options, or send to a professional print service to have it printed.
What are the best Canva features?
Canva is crammed full of features but many are education specific. Before getting into that it's worth noting that Canva auto-saves. This is a great feature both for teachers and students as it means never worrying about losing work – something Google's ecosystem of tools has got many people used to.
While the templates are fantastic to make any presentation, poster, or image have more impact, there are powerful sub-tools. The graph templates, for example, are a great way to help in math and science classes – allowing for specific results to be displayed in a clear visual and engaging way.
Canva for Education is a powerful feature of this tool as it allows teachers to setup a virtual classroom, invite students, and have them collaborate on a project. This could be used in the classroom or remotely, with the aid of a video chat tool as well. In fact, you can link Zoom and then present screen to share the slides with the class as you go.
Comment additions are helpful with @ options, allowing alerts to be sent to the teacher. This lets students enquire about their work as they go, so they can feel confident they're going the right way. A nice tool that's especially helpful in this creative space in which students are given a lot of freedom and can sometimes feel a little lost, especially when working remotely.
Canva helpfully offers free online courses to help learn. There is a specific Canva for the Classroom course (opens in new tab), which is a great way to help teachers learn the best ways to work with the tool.
How much does Canva cost?
Canva is free to use both personally and in a classroom. While that does offer a whole host of tools and features, there are more that can be accessed with a paid for Canva Pro or Enterprise account.
Canva Free gets you more than 250,000 templates, more than 100 design types, hundreds of thousands of photos and graphics, collaboration, and 5GB of cloud storage.
Canva Pro is charged at $119.99 per year, which offers all the free features but has brand kit upload options, one-click Magic Resize for images, more than 420,000 templates, 75 million images, videos and graphics, design saving for team use, 100GB of cloud storage, and social media scheduling for seven platforms.
Canva Enterprise is $30 per person per month and offers all that Pro has plus more brand-focused tools that likely aren't useful in teaching. Want to know more? Check out the break-down here
Canva top tips and tricks
Plan lessons
Use
Canva to visually organize a lesson for yourself as a teacher, but also
to share with students so they know what to expect and can plan
accordingly.
Create student profiles
Have
students create study portfolios to see how they are progressing
throughout the year – this can also be a valuable tool for revision and
review.
Cooperate
With up to 10 members in a project, have groups of students work together in class and digitally from home to create a finished body of work.
Chart graphics
Ideal for math and science, Canva can be used to display data in rich tables and graphs to make presentation experiments and more visually engaging.
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