5 Ways to use the Free Canva for Education in the Elementary Classroom Amy M. Burns Far Hills Country Day School aburns[at]fhcds.org
Canva for Education is a free tool for K-12 teachers and their students where one can create and personalize their own original designs, posters, videos, manipulatives, badges, certificates, or choose from thousands of high-quality, copyright-free educational templates. To access the free Canva for Education program, go to https://www.canva.com/education/, sign up using your education email address, or upload proof of your employment. Once you are approved, you will receive a verification notice via email. There is also a free version, but the educational free version gives you more access to the program. Many educators start out with the free version and then get upgraded to the educational version once they’re verified.
Google Images search tool. Once finished I had to export it so I could print it or place it in their LMS or project it onto a screen during class. This process takes time and energy. However, with Canva, everything is included in the program. And the amount of choices you have to share it, makes it intuitive for you and saves you a lot of time. Here are five ways to use this free education version of Canva in the elementary music classroom. 5. Create a Program There are many times a year where we have to create a program for a concert, informance, musical, and more. In Canva, if you search for programs in templates, you come up with seven categories. From there, you can find numerous templates where you can change the text to feature your program, the font, and the images. I have done this for our conservatory recitals. I have also created a program for our musicals, shared the program as a pdf to my drive, changed the permissions of the pdf to “anyone with a link” can view, copied that link to input into https://www.qr-code-generator.com/, and created a QR code for the families and caregivers to scan at the beginning of the musical. They could now read the program on their devices. This saved us a lot of paper as parents could print the program if they wanted when they got home, but we no longer had crumpled-up programs on the floor or in the trash.
Why use Canva? There are many times throughout the school year that I need to create a program or a poster or a manipulative so that I can hand them out for a concert, or place them as a QR code, or post them in learning management systems (LMS). I tell my students often that I am not an artist like our talented art educator. For this reason alone, I dove into Canva as the copyright-free images, templates, videos, audio, and more gave me the opportunity to create beautiful manipulatives. Ones that I could not create by hand. Canva also saves you a lot of time because you do not have to create programs, posters, and other promotional items from scratch. You can create your own template so that you can reuse them from year-to-year, improving on them with other wonderful tools included in the program. Canva is a One-Stop Shop! I know that I am dating myself when I speak of once having to search multiple websites to find images, videos, elements, and more, to create one poster or one presentation. For example, creating a recorder fingering chart meant that I first searched for an empty recorder chart through a Google Image Search. However, if I was going to use this chart through the students’ LMS, I needed to search for images with Google’s Creative Commons Licenses checked or Commercial and Other Licenses checked. Once I found the image, I downloaded it or saved it to my Google Drive. I then needed to remove the background, so I would upload it to a site like remove.bg to remove the background. I would then download it or save it back to my Google Drive. Now, I either need some sort of drawing tool to cover in the holes for each fingering or a shapes tool to create circles to cover the fingering holes of the recorder chart. Therefore, I would place the image in Google Draw or Microsoft Word, or some sort of design program and create the chart, adding colors, elements, and other items to make it look more pleasing to the students’ eyes. If I wanted to add another image, I was back in the TEMPO
4. Create a Chart as a Resource for the Students as well as Certificates or Badges As stated in the opening, I had taken painstaking measures to create a recorder chart over the years. With Canva, you can do it all within in the app. Start with a poster template. Then search the “Elements” for “recorder instrument”. You will find a Yamaha ivory recorder. Since the thumb hole is not there, I will use the “Elements”>”Circle” tool to add a thumb hole and the “Text” tool to add the word “Thumb”. With Canva, it is good to use a filled in circle shape and then click on the color tab to make it clear. You will then need to click on the outline tool to make it appear. This gives you an empty hole that you can fill in when you need to. I can also resize the items by clicking on the dots at the edge of the image or text to resize them. 32
OCTOBER 2022