Canva for Education: How to get started as a school district

We’re excited to offer Canva for Education to entire K-12 school districts—for free! This aligns with Canva’s most important core value: “be a force for good.” It’s a way to give back to districts who are tirelessly working to support and engage students, teachers and staff.

Canva for Education integrates with your favorite Learning Management Systems (LMSs) including Canvas by Instructure, Schoology by PowerSchool, Google Classroom, and Microsoft Teams, with more to come. For peace of mind, we’re COPPA and FERPA compliant. We invite district leaders to connect with our District Engagement Team and get your entire district set up by completing our form.

But first…

Canva is on a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere. Canva for Education⁠(opens in a new tab or window) makes it easy to create, collaborate, and communicate visually in the classroom. It’s 100% free for K-12 districts, teachers and students. You can bring your ideas to life with over 60,000 ready-to-use educational templates from presentations, posters, newsletters, worksheets, lesson plans, book reports, infographics and more.

Canva for Education provides free access to premium tools and content including millions of premium templates, photos, fonts, icons and videos. It includes unlimited use of popular premium features like image background remover⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and magic switch.

School districts get free access to a brand kit to help manage district logos and colors as well as centralized account provisioning, publishing and sharing controls, and other integrations. There are even free professional development resources for teachers and staff with district set-up.

1) Complete the form at this link⁠(opens in a new tab or window) - click "Contact Us" - instead of trying to get set up on your own. For districts, we recommend integrating with your single sign-on provider via SAML prior to setting up your LMS integrations, to ensure all the components work smoothly with each other.

2) After you’ve had a chance to meet with one of Canva’s District Engagement Advocates, we’ll help get your district configured with SSO. It takes about a week to get up and running, often with an hour or less of your IT staff’s time*Rest assured, after district set-up, teachers in your district who already have Canva for Education accounts will not lose access to the designs they’ve created in Canva.

3) Once you’re set-up with SSO, you can learn about setting up Canva with your LMS. We have several LMS guides for teachers available here with more in the works.

Once you’re set-up, here are some top ways districts are getting started with Canva:

Presentations—design engaging presentations, including interactive and talking presentations

Posters—make eye-catching posters for your schools or classrooms

Parent Newsletters—try Canva’s ready-to-use newsletter templates for exciting announcements and weekly or monthly updates

Social Media Posts—check out Canva’s social media templates for X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook to keep your educational community in the loop

Book reports—there are countless ways for students to use Canva to demonstrate their learning. Read a book? Put together an eye-catching book report.

Facilitate Collaboration—try one of our group work templates to encourage students to collaborate in real-time. It’s incredible to see students bring out the best in one another.

Certificates—easily create certificates to congratulate and recognize your students and staff

Cafeteria Menus—quickly design your weekly or daily menu. Mmm. Is it Taco Tuesday yet?

Craft Time—extend beyond the classroom and make seasonal cards for friends and family. Turn this idea into a unique lesson!

AppSmash—Combine Canva designs and activities with your favorite edtech platforms like FlipGrid or PearDeck. Encourage students to demonstrate their learning from Newsela, Wonderopolis or something they’ve researched by creating a Canva design. The possibilities are endless!

We invite district leaders to contact us by completing the form at this link⁠(opens in a new tab or window) - click "Contact Us". We highly recommend getting our help with an easy set up.