Canva

This week I am going to introduce my 6th grade students to Canva.  Canva is an amazing site to use in Graphic Design.  Their tagline on their website, "Amazingly Simple Graphic Design" and I have to agree!  Students (and adults) search and drag..that is about it!  It is FREE to use and great for BYOD schools.  The only items you may be wondering about are the images that cost $1 each.  Students can design with those images, they would have to pay before they print/download.  Classroom teachers can work around this in our paperless world!

One of the best gems I found was their Design School.  In their design school, they have tutorials and teaching materials!  They are GREAT materials!

I was about to start creating a presentation to introduce this site to my students and WOW...they have it already done...just for us!  

There are four workshops, but I plan to use Workshop One: This is Canva.  There is a workshop on fonts, colors and images; backgrounds, shapes and layouts; branding basics as well.

The best part, I can link the presentation into my Google Classroom!  As you can see on the image to the right, it even includes lecture notes!  As a teacher who is always creating content and presentations, I am super excited to use Canva's!

You will also notice under the workshops are lesson plans from REAL teachers!  They are wonderful examples with a variety of topics and levels of instruction.

Some of you may be wondering how I am using this wonderful Graphic Design Gem...my 6th graders working on a unit to learn about Entrepreneurship.  They are starting their own restaurant.  They have researched, surveyed and decided on a cuisine and logo.  They created a professional business letter asking for funding and ready to design their menu!  Rather than creating a menu using MS Publisher, I wanted to change things up when I saw Canva's menu templates with their vivid images and choice of images!

I plan to have students design in Canva and upload their sharable link into Google Classroom!  No printing, no lost papers and I can see their exact design!

As you can see to the right, students select share and can copy their link and paste it into Google Classroom and select Turn In!

I will keep you updated and hope to share some wonderful work from my 6th graders!

I am going to remind myself tomorrow to Keep Calm, Click Undo!