“Inspire creativity through intuitive graphic design. Canva provides teachers and students with a simple new way to design. Its drag and drop functionality enables them to create presentations, posters, one-page documents, and social media posts.”(Canva)
Canva is a drag and drop graphics design program which enables both teachers and student to create amazing images and posters. It is integrated with the Google suite so really easy for children to access with their Google accounts. https://about.canva.com/education/
There are already about 50,000 templates available to start to inspire creativity. Bookmarks, brochures, menus, posters, children’s book cover templates, cards, recipe cards and loads more. For teachers there are various worksheet templates, lesson plan templates, certificates and more besides.
There are teaching materials available, including lesson plans to help to introduce visual literacy and the ideas are all shared by experienced teachers. As you go into the teaching material section there are four workshops
- This is Canva
- Fonts colours and images
- Background shapes and layouts and
- Branding Basics.
There are many lesson plans available: visual poetry, market a product, comic book creation, getting to know all about you and mathematical modelling among them.
Canva is free, but there are also paid-for graphics. Children do need to be taught to use the free resources but there are plenty to choose from. Students can upload their own images, photos or drawing and add those to the template to make wonderful art works. It would be best to create one account that your students will all access unless you have Google Classroom, where they can all have an account. It works on iPads, other tablets etc. Open a free account and start using it to add to your teaching resources to see just how wonderful it is. Make collages of the class photos, posters for your classroom etc, it is very versatile!
Further Canva Reviews
Bill Ferriter’s Canva write up: Check out Canva’s Education Resources
Richard Byrne also did a write up about it: Canva for Education – Lesson plans incorporating Visuals Across the Curriculum.