What Is Canva And How Does It Work For Education?
Canva is a free-to-use online graphical tool that combines design, photo-editing, and layout to help teachers and students create beautifully finished projects.
- Canva can be used by teachers to generate posters, guidance, and projects, but it can also be accessed by students for tasks. Pupils can use a powerful tool that aids expression to make presentations that are clear and well-finished, and that can also be used for future reference.
Integration with Google Classroom makes this very easy to use for systems already working within that platform.
Canva allows for image editing and project-based learning using a simple drag-and-drop interface that works well even for younger students. From brainstorming as a group working collaboratively to individual project creation, it has lots of potential uses in the classroom.
Canva is optimized for Chromebooks so even the more intensive image-based projects can be handled on most machines, with smooth interaction.
With more than 250,000 templates available, starting and progressing through a topic is very easy, even for those new to the platform. Stock photos, videos, and graphics are also available, with hundreds of thousands of choices from which to pick. All those numbers go even higher if you pay, but more on that below.
How does Canva work?
Canva is easy to sign up for, using either an email, Google account, or Facebook login. Once an account is created, for free, you can pick if you’re using it as a teacher, student, or anything else. This will tailor the experience to your needs, making it simpler to find what you’re looking for.
Teaching how to use Canva can be the focus of a lesson that aims to broaden the digital skills available to students. But since this is so easy to use, it will likely take very little time. Letting the students play with the options is how deeper learning and creativity can flourish.
Canva offers plenty of virtual templates so students can work with a design and add in their own changes. This allows for students to focus on the topic at hand without wasting time or energy on getting started with the tool itself.
Making a poster, for example, will start by offering templates down the left, then the main image on the right that you can customize. Clicking into this will make a toolbar appear with options to edit – this reacting as you work keeps things minimal and clear throughout.
You can upload your own images and videos, which is ideal when working on a smartphone using the app version. Once completed, you can download the file, share it via lots of social media optimized options, or send to a professional print service to have it printed.
What are the best Canva features?
Canva is crammed full of features but many are education specific. Before getting into that it’s worth noting that Canva auto-saves. This is a great feature both for teachers and students as it means never worrying about losing work – something Google’s ecosystem of tools has got many people used to.
While the templates are fantastic to make any presentation, poster, or image have more impact, there are powerful sub-tools. The graph templates, for example, are a great way to help in math and science classes – allowing for specific results to be displayed in a clear visual and engaging way.
Canva for Education is a powerful feature of this tool as it allows teachers to setup a virtual classroom, invite students, and have them collaborate on a project. This could be used in the classroom or remotely, with the aid of a video chat tool as well. In fact, you can link Zoom and then present screen to share the slides with the class as you go.
Comment additions are helpful with @ options, allowing alerts to be sent to the teacher. This lets students enquire about their work as they go, so they can feel confident they’re going the right way. A nice tool that’s especially helpful in this creative space in which students are given a lot of freedom and can sometimes feel a little lost, especially when working remotely.
Canva helpfully offers free online courses to help learn. There is a specific Canva for the Classroom course, which is a great way to help teachers learn the best ways to work with the tool.
How much does Canva cost?
Canva is free to use both personally and in a classroom. While that does offer a whole host of tools and features, there are more that can be accessed with a paid for Canva Pro or Enterprise account.
Canva Free gets you more than 250,000 templates, more than 100 design types, hundreds of thousands of photos and graphics, collaboration, and 5GB of cloud storage.
Canva Pro is charged at $119.99 per year, which offers all the free features but has brand kit upload options, one-click Magic Resize for images, more than 420,000 templates, 75 million images, videos and graphics, design saving for team use, 100GB of cloud storage, and social media scheduling for seven platforms.
Canva Enterprise is $30 per person per month and offers all that Pro has plus more brand-focused tools that likely aren’t useful in teaching.
Canva vs Piktochart – Which Is Better?
Whether you’re a blogger, online entrepreneur, freelancer, or even an agency, one of the best things to have is a DIY design tool.
There are many such DIY design tools being released on the market today. If you’re looking for a strong DIY design tool to use though, you can’t do much better than Canva and Piktochart. Not only are they reasonably priced, but they’re also easy to use.
Piktochart, on the other hand, was formed in 2011 and is designed to empower people to tell powerful visual stories that matter. Over 6 million people from individuals, companies, nonprofits, and others use Piktochart to create beautiful visuals using a wide range of available templates.
Features Piktochart:
What I like about Piktochart is that it’s an all-in-one visual communication solution with features for creating presentations, reports, social media graphics, infographics, and prints.
Not only that, but it’s easy to bring team members on board in the event that I’m working with a larger team and share my visual work, brand assets, and review each other’s work on the fly. This way, it’s easy for everyone on the team to collaborate and stay on the same page.
Some of the design features within Piktochart that I use to create stunning visuals include:
Piktochart offers stunning interactive charts and maps, which I find useful when creating infographics. The best part is that I can create beautiful infographics without any design experience. It’s simply a matter of importing my numbers, picking a chart or map, customizing it, and it’s done.
Piktochart’s editor makes it easy to create infographics. The large library of images and icons makes it easy to pick and place onto the graphic, but I get the option to upload my own images or icons without having to attribute, pay licensing fees, or hassle for it.
Color is important for any brand, which is why I love Piktochart’s color schemes that are easy to flip and try out different looks to match my brand or campaign.
SEO-centric graphics
If you’re a blogger like me, an online store owner, vlogger, or another content creator, SEO is an important factor for any type of content, including graphics. Visual work is created to be seen, but also to be discovered. Piktochart makes it easy for search engines to find and understand visual content.
Security is an important consideration for me when creating visuals. Piktochart allows me not only to publish my visuals anywhere thanks to its versatile sharing options, but I’m also able to protect my work using passwords, download and email it, or share it with the world.
Piktochart’s easy presentation maker comes handy when I need to perfect a pitch, sales proposal, present products, host webinars, or even deliver a keynote speech.
The feature offers great visual assets including animated icons, images, photos, interactive maps, and charts to tell impactful data-driven stories, beautiful color schemes, and emotions.
I’m also able to present my visual stories as a slideshow using slick transitions, showtime, and the native Presentation Mode for instant presentations. Plus, my slides go anywhere I want them to using Piktochart’s versatile sharing options.
With Piktochart’s free online report maker, it’s easy to create insightful yet beautiful reports that turn complex information to impressive, customizable, and interactive maps. What I like about this report maker tool is that it’s free and I don’t have to have coding or technical knowledge to use it.
Canva Features
Canva offers a variety of templates for creating stunning visual graphics such as infographics, reports, flyers, posters, social media posts, YouTube visuals, and much more.
Canva has an awesome suite of features, the main one being the popular document design types. It’s possible to create almost any type of document using Canva such as cards, flyers, social media (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube) graphics, brochures, calendars, invitations, labels, letterheads, logos, photo collages, planners, presentations, resumes, thank you cards, menus, and more.
Unlike Piktochart, which offers six categories of documents I can use for visual designs, Canva offers a wide variety of document types so I’m not necessarily limited to the six common ones.
Canva is equally easy to use, modify, and scale automatically based on the dimensions I need for my graphics, without needing design or coding experience. I can create perfect designs in a matter of minutes.
Canva also offers different textures and backgrounds that accentuate images with transparency or photo filters and use them in any part of my designs. I can pick from fanciful designs and patterns to real-world papers and fabrics to add to my visuals. With Canva, I’m literally spoiled for choices.
Canva’s image copper comes handy when I want to crop my images for precise, trim compositions.
The image cropper is especially helpful where I have images that could use some retouching or that may need to be labeled. It’s easy to crop my photos and transform the shots to look stunning with my next project as they’re trimmed down to the right size.
Plus, I don’t have to open my laptop or computer to crop images; I can do it from any mobile device like an Android phone, iPhone, iPad, or tablet using the free canva app.
