 Hi, I'm Stephanie Yancey. Today we'll be exploring Canva. It's a web app that can be used to create all types of graphics for use in the classroom, social media, and beyond. Before we get started, don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell to enable notifications for our channel by clicking our logo during the video. Also, if you're not already familiar with Canva, check out our related video by clicking the pop-up card in the upper right-hand corner because we're going to be jumping right in. Here's how to get started with expressing learning visually with Canva. So for this lesson, we're going to be looking at how to use Canva specifically to create an infographic. One thing that I do want to call out is that if you are an educator, you want to make sure that you have a Canva educator account. And you can do that by going to canva.com slash education. So I'm going to go up to my home page and I'm going to get started with my infographic. So something to think about starting off is that you want to really prep your students for working with an infographic. Infographics are great because they visually display information. They can make a complicated subject easier to understand or they can share a lot of information in a really compact way. So we're going to assume that at this point I've already done my research and I'm coming to Canva with my information. Today I'm going to be creating an infographic on the aquatic biome. So I'm going to start off by choosing my education infographic option. You could also go up to templates, but I'm just going to click it since it's right here. So I see lots of different templates over on my left-hand side. But because I'm doing an aquatic biome infographic, I'm just going to type in nature and see if I can narrow down some options here. Okay, so these definitely a little more what I'm looking for. More nature-based colors, some nature-based graphics. So maybe I can find something a little bit more specific to what I'm looking for. And scrolling through, I think this tsunami template is going to be great because I'm doing water. It's blue. It already has some ocean waves and things in there, so that's going to work really well. And also because I'm giving an overview of the aquatic biome, I know that this layout's going to help because it gives me five different areas to put five bullets of information. So now that I have my template, I'm going to start editing to add in my information that I've developed through my research. Starting off with the title, I just want to call out some of the advanced options that you have in Canva. I've selected this first word and this toolbar up at the top changes based on what I'm selecting. So you see a lot of the typical font and text box editing options here. A couple that I want to point out. One is this spacing option here. It's going to let you decide your letter and line spacing. And that can be really important for personalizing your graphic based on your needs. So you see here that my letter spacing for the first word is 167. And my letter spacing for the second word is negative 57. So I'm going to go in and I'm going to type in the words that I'm going to use here, which is aquatic biomes. And then I'm going to go in and I'm just going to change the spacing so that they're equal. So I'm going to change this to zero and go back and change this to zero. Another button on this toolbar is the effects button. So when I select it, it's going to give me options for changing up the style of the text. So I'll give you a sample of that. If I highlight aquatic and I go down to this neon option, it's going to change the look of that. So you've got some presets there and you can also personalize those. But I don't want that. So I'm going to change that back. Animate, we're not going to use right now because we're going to be printing this piece out. So those are some additional options that you might not be used to seeing in that text bar. Okay, let's get out of that. So now while we're here, let's take a look at guidelines. So I'm going to add in my definition of aquatic biomes here and you can see that when I click off, that's not filling up that space in exactly the same way. So I'm going to take that extra space out of there, grab this text box and then use my guidelines to make sure that it's in the best place in this box. So you can see here that when I click and start moving, I get these magenta colored guidelines and different ones show up according to where I move it. I know that I want this to be right in the middle of that dark blue box. And then I also want it to be aligned with the edge of my lighter colored boxes down. So I'm going to use those guidelines to make sure that all of my elements are situated exactly where I want them so that it's pleasing to the eye. Okay, I'm going to fast forward here while I make some changes to my text and get some of my information in. And then we'll look at working with some other elements. So we've looked at editing and personalizing our text boxes and our titles and our regular text. Now let's look at some graphics. So the template that I chose is using kind of icon or cartoonish graphics. And I think it would be really cool since I'm talking about animals and specific types of aquatic biomes to use actual images. And this is where Canva can be really powerful. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to select all these graphics, hit my delete button, go ahead and get them out of there. And I'm going to go over to my elements bar on the far left. Now I get lots of options here, photos, videos, graphics, photos are what I want to focus on. So I'm going to go ahead and start searching for my first element. And I'm going to show my marine and freshwater types of aquatic biomes. So one marine biome is a coral reef. So I'm going to search for coral reef, get lots of options here, especially if you're using that education version and you get these EDU versions. And I'm going to choose photos specifically. So now I get several photo options. What's really great about this for your students is that these are free to use. So rather than going out to Google and getting a graphic that is copyrighted and that you're going to have to make sure that the students have the rights to use, everything in Canva is free to use. So that's a really good place to put your students to find graphics as well as photos. So I'm just going to pick this coral reef. I think this looks nice. I'm going to grab it and drag it over, get it in there. Use my little corners to go ahead and minimize it. I want things to be about the same size. So you can see that when I was looking at this, I made the width to 70 and I'm going to kind of keep track of that. And I'm going to use my guidelines again to get that located exactly where I want. So now freshwater option, going to choose a river. Same thing to choose photos and find a river that I like. Same thing going to drop it in, going to make it about the same size. It doesn't have to be perfect. I'm going to drag it. Remember to use those guidelines to get it exactly in the middle of the box below and then also lined up with the box next to it. So now I've got my two actual images, photographs of my two biomes as opposed to an icon. So I'm going to go ahead and add the rest of these in and then I will talk about how to change up some colors. Okay. So I've added in my photos as well as the rest of my content that I've researched and now I'm going to further personalize with colors. So I'm going to click on my background first. You'll see up here you get this options bar. Here it has my background color. I get the document colors up here, which are great because it keeps a unifying look if you keep using the same colors within your graphic. I also have some other colors here but I'm going to scroll down and look specifically at these photo colors because this is really helpful in Canva. So what Canva does is it takes the images that you've put on your graphic and it pulls out the colors from it. So you can choose a palette that is going to be uniform and also going to coordinate with your images. So I'm going to take a look at these new palettes and see what I think will work for my graphic. And after I choose my colors, I can change up my graphics. So I can go in. I'm going to choose water. I want to graphic here specifically and go ahead and delete that one and choose another one that I like. So now we have our finished infographic where we've taken a template, we've added in our own information that we gathered from research and then we've changed the template using Canva elements to personalize it and make it fit our needs. So this is a great way for students to do research and then demonstrate their learning in a visual way. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for watching. Be sure to like, comment, or reply to one of our other videos in the playlist below. Subscribe to our channel and enable notifications that you don't miss out on the next episode. Don't forget to check out our other resources like this cast podcast and see what else is going on at Ori County Schools. Be sure to follow us at Dear Dis is on social media or contact us via email or our blog.