Activities to keep students engaged in the classroom

Even the most fascinating lessons can fall flat without some student engagement strategies in place to encourage active participation. Canva makes it easy to keep your students engaged by creating an active classroom, whatever you’re teaching. Here are some ideas to help your students start inspired, and stay engaged and active throughout their learning journey.

You can set your students up for success by establishing clear expectations. Explicitly outlining expectations empowers your students, encourages community and helps build a positive work culture in your classroom. Why not ask your students to share their expectations for the class? See how Canva can help you establish clear expectations with this video.

Help your students focus, stay organized and encourage self-directed learning by creating daily agendas. You can present or share the daily agenda to encourage routine so your students can clearly see what’s coming in the day ahead. A daily agenda also helps to minimize the distraction of uncertainty. See how Canva can help you create engaging daily agendas with this video.

Unleash your creativity and design a distinctive classroom brand that helps keep your students engaged. Start inspired with Canva’s Classroom Kits templates and customize them to design a classroom space that encourages a sense of belonging and wonderment. Learn more about how your class brand can help keep your students engaged.

First impressions are important. Introduce yourself in style with Canva’s meet the teacher presentation templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window). You can customize the design to reflect your personality and present it to your class. You can even share the link so they can show their parents. Why not encourage your students to create an ‘about me’ presentation? Learn more about building class relationships here.

Canva makes it easy for everyone to make engaging and creative presentations⁠(opens in a new tab or window). Use our education presentation templates to bring learning to life. You can easily embed Youtube videos, record video instructions, make a screencast, and use images, data and visual elements in your presentations. Ever wanted to be in two places at once in the classroom? Learn how you can flip your classroom instruction to create more time to support students in active learning with talking presentations.

Help students engage with and remember important messages by designing memorable announcements⁠(opens in a new tab or window). Encourage your students’ active learning by designing eye-catching announcements celebrating achievements and milestones with video messages⁠(opens in a new tab or window). Help encourage parental learning support by opening lines of communication between school and home by designing effective parent communication⁠(opens in a new tab or window). Use Canva’s announcement templates to customize an invitation to an event, update parents on classroom news, or share students’ wins with their parents with an encouragement card.

Encourage active learning with your students by stoking their critical and creative thinking with these brainstorming templates. Give your students the tools and space they need to create and express their ideas with creative brainstorming templates. You can even encourage active participation before, during and after class with KWL templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window) that allow students to reflect on their learning journey. See more brainstorming activities here.

Take your students’ active participation to new levels with video activities. Canva makes it easy to create, edit and share videos within the Canva editor. You can record yourself or your screen and save time with ready to go videos, music and photos. Students can easily create video presentations with Canva’s library of templates. See what else you can do with Canva’s video studio.

Make student assignments more engaging and easier to track with Canva. Create structured assignments using templates, or empower them to unleash their creativity with a blank design. Once your assignment is ready, you can share it with your class so each student receives their own design to work on. You can even include instructions. Interactive assignments have never been easier to create, share, track and review. Learn more here.

Encourage active learning and storytelling skill development with Canva. Let students express their creativity and reinforce learning by creating and sharing Comic Strips⁠(opens in a new tab or window), storyboards⁠(opens in a new tab or window), and even books⁠(opens in a new tab or window). Canva makes it easy to empower your students and encourage creative expression.

Use these student engagement strategies and learning activities to encourage an active classroom. Use our library of templates to make it easier to design eye-catching and memorable tools, activities and presentations to brighten your students’ days.