Empower Learners to be Creative Graphic Designers
Community Review for Canva for Education
My Take
I love this as a tool to create public products, especially for elementary students, giving them an opportunity to explore and create visual design genres such as posters, cards, print ads, along with graphics for presentations, video and web. It is a super simplified version of Photoshop and is free. It has both an app and web version. The design school offers tutorials and templates that help learners get started, and I like how it offers free images, icons, and clip art as well as an upload option for own images. I've used it with learners as young as first grade, and they easily navigated the platform. The biggest challenge was helping them understand file formats, saving and importing to other platforms (social media, video, etc).
How I Use It
In our highly visual world, we can empower our learners to be creators of content, not just consumers, and Canva offers a simple user experience for all ages to create graphics. Our students have used Canva for various different learning experiences: graphics for green screen video, invitations to school events, graphics for digital books, infographics for research projects, and posters of all kinds. As a teacher, I've used it to create graphics for Twitter chats as well graphics for our school website and social media. Canva does have a design school equipped with tutorials ranging from font choice to color to layout. The tutorials are fairly straight forward, though they are not necessarily written for a younger audience. We have found that teaching good design principles and teaching writing for an audience deepens the learning experience and increases quality work. This is a great tool to create public products.