Canva

At our most recent Opals User Group meeting, a colleague mentioned Canva as a great tool for use in the school library. I had never heard of it, so I dug around a bit to see what it was all about.

Basically it is a graphic design program. It provides templates, pictures, fonts, colors, and sizes and you decide how you want to put it together. I can see so much potential for this in the library. From making flyers, bookmarks, and notices to creating shelf markers for various sections of non-fiction, I think this would be a great tool.

To be honest, I had a little difficulty finding out about using Canva as a teacher. From what I understand, students can log in under their google usernames and passwords and just start doing there thing. I am used to see an overview option for teachers, so teachers can supervise what students are doing on the program, but I can't seem to find one for Canva. Maybe it isn't necessary, but it feels a little odd at first to not have that option. On the Canva for education page it mentions that students can share with each other, but I am not sure if that is simply through the sharing button or if there is a way to create a group of people beyond using the paid for version of Canva called Canva work. Even with Canva work, it seems that you can only invite up to 10 people to be on your "team" to work together, which is still less than a teacher would need!  Clearly I need to do some more digging for that.

As soon as I created an account with Canva, it asked me who I was so they could suggest products that would be useful for me. I was happy to see "librarian" as one of the choices. It then asks what you want to make and eventually, after a number of questions, it gives you the option to begin work on a particular template. It has several infographic templates and I can see students enjoying to summarize and communicate learned facts quickly that way.

Canva has a clean and intuitive interface. As you can see on the left hand side, you can customize the layout, the various elements, the text, the background image, and even upload your own images to use. 

One thing that came to mind when browsing the site was how convenient it is for students to know they are allowed to use particular graphics without worries about copyright infringement. While they need to learn how to find images to use online, it is nice to also give them the chance to focus on the visual elements of their presentation rather than on the legality of the images they are using. There are images included in the results that are from the marketplace, so if you decided to use them, you would pay a small fee (it seems to be about $1), but the free images pop up first and there seems to be a good selection of them! 

Canva has a list of lesson plans for educators to use in their classrooms, which is pretty terrific! It is a basic lesson plan, so you would need to include what standards they meet and differentiate it for your own students, but it gives a general guideline, which is useful to newbies and interesting for advanced users to peruse. 

Overall, I think Canva is a great addition to any teacher's toolkit. I love that it is integrated with Google so students can begin to use it without the hassle of a new username. It works on iPads and chromebooks which is awesome for Google Schools. As far as I can see, it is free for students and teachers to use. 

Most importantly, I think students would be excited to use this program. Canva can create social media icons, pictures, or notices, so this seems a very timely and useful program for students to learn. Digital communications are so important for students to use and understand and I think Canva gives students a chance to practice communicating through visual elements as well. 

Can't wait to use this!