How to set up a remote classroom with Canva for Education

Although we often associate learning with the hallowed halls of school buildings, transformative education is more of a headspace than a place. Education can happen anywhere; in the classroom or the cul de sac behind your home and with the increase of remote learning services, it’s become clearer than ever that where you learn matters less than how you’re learning.

Still, in order to maintain a high standard of education when teachers and students aren’t in the same room falls with effective technology to streamline and strengthen the process. That’s where Canva for Education comes in. Whether you’ve recently moved to remote learning or you simply want to supplement your classes with some inspiring creative work, Canva for Education is your best bet for encouraging students to do their best work and build creativity in the classroom—whatever that may look like.

What is Canva for Education?

Canva for Education is the learning-based extension of Canva, where interactive, immersive teaching and learning can take place virtually. In times when gathering students in a classroom isn’t possible or remote learning has become preferable, Canva for Education can help facilitate a learning environment that mimics the educational continuity, access, and structure that makes traditional schools so important. In short: It’s a way of continuing your classes and lessons online, without having slow, clunky technology getting in the way.

Why use Canva for Education?

Canva for Education is perfect for a teacher or educator who is switching to remote working or online classes, as well as those who want to strengthen classroom creativity. The main benefit is that educators —and all their students—can access this platform for free, with no limits on offerings or time.

It’s also helpfully compatible with platforms you’re already using, including Dropbox, Google Drive, and Google Classroom, so signing up doesn’t mean giving up processes you’ve created and streamlined elsewhere. With easy-to use-design features and single sign-on for easy student access, Canva for Education is built for everyone.

As a tool for teaching, it’s also great at encouraging creativity, enhancing collaboration and streamlining work.

You’ll hardly believe where Canva’s wide range of templates can take you and your students. From Powerpoint presentations to eye-catching infographics and worksheets, there’s little that your students can’t achieve when they’re creating it with Canva.

Access thousands of premium images and graphics

Student presentations and projects instantly become more exciting when created through Canva, with students receiving access to over 60,000 templates across posters, notepads, and infographics, as well as millions of images, thousands of font types and over 800,000 illustrations and icons. It’s where imagination comes to life.

The images available to Canva users are vast and widespread, meaning any project that you create in Canva can be wholly original and representative, as well as being staggeringly easy to create. Everything from websites to posters can be customized using templates: have a look at Yellow Teal Photo Graduation Events Website and Trash Recycling Classroom Poster for some initial ideas.

Discover posters for graduation, and many other school-related poster templates in our library.

Intuitive collaboration

With simple drag and drop and easily customizable elements, Canva’s platform is extremely intuitive to use and easy to teach for any digital literacy level. The ease of the platform really comes into its own when it comes to classroom collaboration: also compatible with Google Classroom, it gives teachers and their students a central hub for their tasks and assignments, with the sharing of work between students also made easily possible.

Download a wide range of file types

It doesn’t matter what kind of project you have the class working on, there’s a film format to go with it: downloadable in JPG, PDF, PPT, video and GIF, students can see their efforts come to life in exactly the way they envisaged it. With Canva’s image converter, you can directly convert other image file types like WebP to PNG or JPG, HEIC to PNG or JPG, SVG to PNG, and JPEG to JPG. And now with Canva’s PDF Converter, you can also convert PDF files to JPG and PPT or convert an image file such as JPG to PDF.

First, sign up to Canva with your school email account to get started. Then, head to Canva for Education, read up on all the features and tools available, before scrolling to the bottom and registering, using relevant details about you and your teaching role. You should hear back from a Canva team member within 24 hours and once you’re approved, you’re ready and raring to go.

How to collaborate with your students

You can think of Canva as your own virtual classroom, where you can have conversations about work, helping to clarify tasks as you go, leave students to work amongst themselves and submit completed work, as well as provide feedback for assignments, all in the same place.

Here’s how to master a few of these tasks.

How to create your virtual classroom

Once you’ve been accepted to Canva for Education, you can begin adding students to your virtual classroom.

How to post a piece of work to your class

After you’ve chosen your Canva template and customized it to your specifications, it’s time to pass it to your students. Click the ‘publish’ button in the top right-hand corner and then, scroll down and select how you want to share it: it could be posted straight to Google Classroom, so students can instantly see what you’ve created, be it a worksheet, schedule for the weekor a poster discussing the importance of joining the anti-bullying plight. If the work is relevant for some students but not all, why not send a select few students a direct link? That’s also an option. You can also download it as a PDF to show as an example of how you want them to structure their work in person too. There are multiple possibilities, all displayed under the publish button.

How to leave a comment on a piece of work

Feedback is such an important tool as a teacher and luckily, you still have the ability despite the distance in this software. The other great thing about feedback in Canva is that it’s a two-way dialogue, so students can ask direct questions of you about their work in order to clarify whether they’re on the right track.

All you have to do is click somewhere relevant on the piece of work, then, an icon of a speech bubble with a plus sign will appear to the right. Click this, then tag the person you want to direct the comment to, write your comment in the text field, then click ‘comment’. The recipient will receive a notification and can reply directly to this field.

How to tag a student

This is a handy trick for students and teachers alike and is easily done, by following the steps outlined for commenting on a piece of work. Students can collaborate within the project using the comment tool in the same way they would in a classroom setting.

How to submit an assignment

After a students work has been completed, sending it to their teacher is simply a matter of clicking the ‘send to teacher’ button in the top right-hand corner, selecting the correct teacher from the dropdown menu, adding a comment in the text field (if necessary), then clicking ‘send’.

Assignments of all types are easy with Canva templates. Infographics are a great way to visually display the results of research and they’re easily created with templates such as Top Major South America Commodities and Green Illustration Butterfly Timeline Infographic.