 My name is Alex Birdie. I am the instructional coach at Blackwater Middle School. And I'm Janelle Gauke. I teach sixth grade science at Conway Middle. Alex and I worked together for the last six years. Yeah. Long time, long time. So what exactly is Canva? Well Canva is a free to use online graphic design tool that can be used to create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos, and many more. The uses for Canva in the classroom are very wide. What you will learn by using this website is that you can assign work to your students that is as complex or as simple as you need it to be. So let's just real quick talk about the basics here. So over something that's new is Canva for Education. And what Canva for Education is it's it gives you the pro features, but for free. So what you would have to do is go to canva.com slash education. You will click the get verified button. And you should gain access to Canva for Education. So when you want to start creating your design, let me share this tab for you. Get back to the home screen. So once you get logged in to your Canva for Education account, you will come to a page that will look similar to this one. So to start your first design up here in the top right, you would select the create a design button. Now they have here some suggested templates to use. I shouldn't use the word template. But what they are is it changes the size of whatever you're trying to make. So a presentation infographic and you know, for example, I know in social studies we use the brochure a lot. So that's another option that you have there. But I'm just going to go ahead and click presentation. So when you create a new design, it's going to show up as a blank template. So what we're going to do is just kind of go over the website real quick, the toolbar. So over here on the left hand side, you see that you have the templates to choose from. So for example, this is the one I used for the presentation. You can add an individual slide or you can add all of them. So if I wanted all of these and to modify them for a presentation, I would click apply all 10 pages, and it will take a second and then everything else would load up. And by the way, it's important for you guys to understand as well that all of your keyboard functions that you're probably used to using in Google Slides or PowerPoint or Microsoft Word, it's the same in Canva. So Control-C or Command-C if you're using Macbook is your copy feature. Control-V, Paste, Control-Z, Undo, things like that. It's all the same on the Canva software. There are a lot of different templates that you can look at. There are a lot of different layouts, simple layouts that you can add as well. They have really done an amazing job building up this library over the course of the last few years. I think I said the other day that when we first rolled Canva out, I tried it at first, and it was very limited. I didn't like it too much, so I didn't use it as much as I should have. But then in the last year, you see the template library that they built and the functionality that they've improved on. And it really is something that I relied heavily on for me in the classroom. Down here you see elements. This is where you can use any of photos. If you want to add a table, there's just a lot of things, your shapes, things like that nature. You can add there. If you wanted to upload a particular picture or a video or recording of yourself, you can use this feature as well. Use your text. So any text that you want to use, the stock photos that you might want to use would be found here. So with the Canva for Education account, you should be able to use any of the photos they have listed here. You shouldn't have to worry about trying to pay for any of them. You can use different styles, add charts, and you can upload logos and use that. A couple of other things to note up here next to your initials would be what you would title the design, the present feature, and then how you would share it with other people. So here are some examples that Janelle and I have from our classrooms over the course of the last few years. So in this student's example, you see this is a brochure. We used a brochure template for it. This student made a brochure that compared and contrasted population and migration with China and Vietnam. This is a project that one of my sixth graders made last year. Now bear in mind, this is the end of the year. So we were in our animal unit and they had to make a project based on one of the animals that I provided. So I gave them a list. And this came out really good. Now at the beginning of the year, the sixth graders, it was my first time working in sixth grade, but they were struggling. They hadn't really used Canva. They were still getting comfortable with the device. And there was a lot of moaning and groaning. But by the end of the year, and I said this to them too, I was just blown away by how good the quality of work was that was coming from them. So they really do get comfortable pretty quickly. And here's another example from eighth grade science. So you guys can see this is just another infographic from an eighth grade student. When we were covering the different eras, as you can see, there's more writing here. So it's it's a little more advanced than what you just saw, but works for both grades. So when you create your design, right, if I click that, I want to make an infographic. Okay, this is what the kids love to do. So they'll go over here and they'll say, okay, I'm going to add a heading. And I'm going to I'm just going to use Emma's name from before. And then they'll do this. Because that looks like good size, right? Well, remember, if you're not used to Canva, the percentage is always very low. So right here, it's on 25%. So what I tell them, they're always saying, oh, there's not enough room to put this all on one page, can I have four pages? No, you can't have four pages, because that's not an infographic. Or, you know, you want them to do a one pager. So what I do is I'll go over and I'll show them, okay, let's put it up to 100. And now let's see how big your name is, do you want your name to be that big? And then they realize that no, they don't want their name to be that big. And they'll go like this, you know, and it's just it makes a lot more sense to them. So what I like to tell them to do is to keep it around like 50, because they can still see that what they're doing is big, and they have a lot of room to write. And I just wanted to emphasize that because you'll get, you know, you'll ask for a poster and you'll get 12 pages. I would prefer to do it as up here in the top right, they would click the share button. Anyone with the link, make sure it's set to that. And then can view and I would have them just copy the link and post it into the or paste it into the Google classroom assignment. Somebody did ask earlier if they could download these, yes, you can. So you would click the download button, and you have the different styles or the different ways you could do that. So you can download it for PDF, PNG, JPG, and it will also show you what the suggested mode is. Thanks for watching. Please subscribe to the Deirdre's YouTube channel for more video tutorials.