A couple of months ago Canva launched an education page full of lesson plans built around the idea of getting students to think and express themselves creatively through visual design. Since the launch Canva has added more lesson plans and more design tutorials to their education page. In all there are now thirty design tutorials that students can work through on their own or with guidance from you. I’ve been slowly working through the tutorials myself. Some of what I’ve learned has been put to use in the blog post images that have appeared in posts like this one about the pros and cons of using social media for school announcements.

Some of the new lesson plans on Canva’s education page include comic book creation, a lesson on sugar in our diets, and a lesson on illustrating ideas with infographics. That last lesson plan takes advantage of Canva’s new infographic design templates. To use the infographic templates or any of the other design templates in Canva simply log-in and open the design menu. Each template can be customized with your own images, fonts, and colors. You can also customize the dimensions of each template.

Applications for Education
Terri Eichholz’s lesson plan, To Make a Long Story Short is one of my favorite lesson plans on the Canva education page. The point of the lesson is to have students identify the themes of story and design a graphic to concisely represent those themes.