Back to School: Creative ways teachers are using Canva

Creativity is born in the classroom, and we’re proud to be supporting more than 45 million students and teachers across the world to grow visual communication, collaboration and innovation in learning through Canva for Education. We know that finding the time to dream up new back-to-school ideas that capture students attention can be challenging, so thanks to our incredible Canva for Education community, we’re excited to share some of the unique ways teachers are engaging their students and inspiring their classrooms with Canva.

Engaging your class with visual communication

Research shows design literacy is on the rise, and using visual tools like Canva is a great way for students to learn the skills of tomorrow. From Docs and Presentations, to Videos, Websites, and Whiteboards, we strive to provide a single, free visual communication platform that houses more than 100,000 templates across a variety of subjects and grade levels to supercharge your back to school planning. We’re continuously adding new tools, apps and features to enhance our education community’s experience and take your lesson plans to the next level.

Making use of multimedia

We live in an increasingly visual world – and video plays a huge role in capturing attention through engaging content. Adding video to your lessons is an easy way to provide a fun and interactive experience, and we’ve got thousands of free educational video templates ready to be customized to any topic.

Many schools in our community are now using Canva to create video news updates, and students are loving it! Not only is it a creative way to capture attention – it's also a collaborative way to increase confidence and grow public speaking skills.

Kristina Holzweiss, an Edtech Librarian at Syosset High School in New York, USA, utilizes Canva’s Video suite to engage her students by creating GIFs, transforming images into videos by adding animation, and developing YouTube videos. Her students have been enthusiastic to get involved, recording videos for public service announcements about endangered animals, and using Canva’s video background remover tool to create a green screen effect in their Halloween stories.

Taking posters and presentations to the next level

From science reports to literacy projects, Canva's colorful and creative resources will keep even the most reluctant learners engaged. Whether you're creating a printable poster or a presentation, our content library is home to thousands of ready-to-use templates, or if you’re looking to start the year fresh with a particular theme, we’ve got plenty of Classroom Decor Kits for you to customize to suit your needs.

Galina Rozhkova, an English Language Arts Teacher in Johnson City Schools District in Tennessee, USA, loves that the interactive nature of Canva allows students to bring their own creative flair to existing designs. A big fan of group work and collaboration, Galina often utilizes set Canva templates and tasks students with collaborating to update slides with infographics and animations – all made possible in real-time due to multiple users being able to access a singular design at once.

Even when working on their own personal templates, Galina finds her students continue to discuss their designs and share their information with each other, which has helped to rapidly boost creativity in her classroom. On a recent project, students used Canva to represent themes in a novel by animating symbols or drawing their own. Different students had different ideas, and the interactive experience meant many students who didn’t originally identify themselves as creative grew in confidence.

Supercharging collaboration with Whiteboards

Canva Whiteboards gives you infinite space to collaborate – from brainstorms and project planning, to storyboard mapping and moodboard development. Available to use stand-alone, or within presentations, they’re a fantastic resource for running engaging professional development sessions, unit planning with other teachers, or teaching students how to collaborate with each other. Keen to workshop ideas with your students? Set the timer and watch the screen populate with ideas on personalized colorful sticky notes.

For Colby Hawkins, a Digital Learning Specialist in Utah, USA, Canva has become an indispensable, time-saving daily tool. Existing templates and icons all in one place mean he doesn’t have to start from scratch when brainstorming, and can collaborate with students in real time via Whiteboards, even when they aren’t in the same space.

Whiteboards can also be a great way to sense-check your students' understanding too. Emily Tranter, a High School English Teacher at Australian Christian College, often uses Canva Whiteboards as an interactive way for students to share thoughts and ideas, while providing an opportunity for Emily to gauge their understanding of different topics.

Adding the magic touch

Developed with safety in mind, our suite of AI Magic tools can be used as a collaborative partner in the classroom, with the potential to free up hours of planning time and supercharge your ideas. Our AI text generator Magic Write is great for helping teachers brainstorm lesson plans, question prompts and writing samples, or Magic Design can provide you with the perfect starting point on presentations ahead of sharing with your classroom.

We’re always looking at ways to innovate our product to unleash learning potential and inspire creativity in the classroom and we’re humbled to have an incredible community of teachers, students and educators utilizing Canva. As a large portion of the world heads back to school, we can’t wait to hear about the incredible creations brought to life in the coming months.

Canva for Education is 100% free for all K-12 teachers, students, schools, districts, campuses, ministries and school systems. Sign up today and check out some of our latest back-to-school templates.

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