
I bet you didn't know you can do THIS in Canva
Welcome back to another episode of the Edumagic podcast. This episode is brought to you by my TPT store where you can find resources to help you during your college career as an education major. Today's episode is titled a few things you might not know that you can do in canva. In this episode, we are going to check some of my favorite features of Canva for Edu which include canva presentations, worksheets, infographics, and a QR code creator.
So first and foremost, let's head on over to canva.com and you can create an educator account.
Back in 2014, when I first started teaching, I was looking for a poster creation tool online. My colleague Brittany Groff showed me Canva. There's so much you can do within here. When I got into Canva more deeply that semester, I found there's a lot you can do within it from creating posts for social media, to creating flyers and infographics.
If you're a practicing teacher, if you go to Canva for education, you can create a free educator account. It is phenomenal. You can see with Canva for EDU, you can have
assignments
a class with classwork
plan out your content
it includes a lot of different templates just for teachers
So I'm going to walk you through a few of my favorite options here within Canva.
Presentations
All of the design work is done for you. So all you have to do is worry about adding in your own content.
Add each slide individually
Or you can add all of them
Add in your own elements like shapes and graphics and photos, videos.
You can search with the search feature and you can filter out content.
Change up the background of the design
QR codes
So instead of going to a QR code creator, downloading the QR code image, uploading it here into Canva, you can just click on QR in Canva. To create a QR code in canva:
Select QR code on the left side
Type in your favorite website
Click generate code
Now we have a code that goes to our favorite website.
Character creation
You can also create and customize the character. This could be a neat project for students to create their characters in a book that they wrote. Or create a historical figure using these characters. You can customize
clothes
facial expression
skin tone
hair color
Create an infographic in Canva
So instead of reading a research article and then writing a paper on it, I have my students read the research article and then create an infographic. This is just a neat way for students to show what they know in a visual way. They can download their infographic as a JPEG or PNG a PDF. If they have any movie elements on their infographic, they can download as MP4 as well.
You can start from scratch or create from a template. Then edit the design as you see fit with charts, graphics, and graphs. You can also edit the text in the infographic to make it your own.
Create digital portfolio headers
My students started using Google classroom headers for their digital portfolio headers. So they customize the content, the text, some of the backgrounds. Then they downloaded it and uploaded it as a header image into Weebly or Wix.
Instead of just thinking, oh, that's just for Google classroom, you can use it for your digital portfolio, making some really cool visuals for your projects.
Canva for worksheets
You can edit the worksheet for your own needs. Create a canva worksheet and print them or use them in a PDF editor of your choice. Then you can have students interact with the worksheet digital using tools like
These three tools give them the option to complete the worksheet online with accessibility built right in. You can also set up the tools to auto-grade a few pieces too - saving you teacher time.
Lesson plan at a glance one sheet
Every teacher needs a good, a lesson plan template, and canva has you covered. Once you write your full lesson plan in whatever format that your university or school requires, pull that content from your lesson plan and put it in a lesson plan at a glance. This will help you save time by not having to flip through your whole binder, instead you can just easily look at the lesson plan at a glance.
You can download that as a PDF uploaded into OneNote, edit it there or print them out.
Canva Presentations
You can now present in Canva. There a several options
Present standard where you are just showing the screen of slides.
Presenter view - present your presentation with a view of our note
Present and record - create an asynchronous piece or video that you can use with your students.
Present live - This gives students a link to join with a code. They can add in chat with text and emojis. This is a fun way to see how students are doing with the content. They can give a thumbs up or heart emoji that comes up on the screen. Students can also write their response on canva live.
Magical shortcuts - 0-9 numbers provides a countdown timer, b - blur the screen, q- quiet symbol, d-drumroll, o- bubbles.
Other feature of Canva edu
Group work - anyone can edit the canva project
Agendas / Planners
Flyers
The sky is the limit when it comes to Canva for education. I encourage you to go check it out and see what you and your students create. If you have just been using it for flyers, it is so much more than that. Share your ideas for Canva below.