I was inspired to use more Canva in my lessons after attending the BETT convention last month. Their displays alone just looked like so much fun, I wanted to bring that home to my classroom!
My only experience of Canva was using it as a tool for teachers to create resources to deliver content to their classes. I really wanted my students to have the opportunity to use such a creative resource. Our students have one to one devices so there was no excuse to shy away from it for any longer!
I decided to try to use Canva as an assessment tool for first year students. I wanted to use a fun way to assess their learning at the end of the topic. The students were tasked with creating an infographic for incoming 1st year students to teach them the basics of co-ordinate geometry.
I used OneNote to create a page for students to work from, firstly to brainstorm what an infographic is & why it may be useful in our lesson. I shared this page with students so that they could use their devices to fill in their brainstorming information and also tick off the success criteria as they completed their infographic.
I created a success criteria for the students to follow. To get the most out of a creative task I think it is important to support the students as to what content is to be included so that they are still learning while creating.
As I am not overly familiar with Canva, I collaborated with another teacher so that she could show me the basics to get the students started! The students were quick to find their way around Canva. Once they were all set up with profiles they very quickly chose their infographic template. The ability to choose templates for documents, presentations, graphs etc is an amazing benefit of Canva! It allows students to use a ready-made template, with lots of choice. This helped with time as students were able to get straight to ticking off their success criteria.
Canva’s super user friendly search tool made it easy for students to add in diagrams, change fonts and edit their designs! Students were able to use their digital inking to draw on their infographics which is a great benefit of the Lenovo Touchpads that the first years have.
Finally, the students shared their infographics using a class Padlet! The students even recognised how important their infographics are for visual learners, hoping they would help to teach the incoming first years!
I would highly recommend using Canva with students, it allowed students who would usually cringe at the thought of drawing or making a poster to enjoy being creative. It was a great revision tool, as students helped each other to meet the success criteria & discussed what they were including in their infographic.
My classroom walls will be full of students Canva creations by the end of the year!