Canva - A design tool
KEYSTONE EXAM by Jonathan Crawford
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Canva is an online tool for graphic design that allows users to create products such as fliers, infographics, resumes, book covers, T-shirts, you name it! It comes pre-loaded with templates, fonts, design elements, royalty-free pictures, and other features available to users for free. Canva also has options for premium subscriptions and paid graphics, depending on what you are comfortable using. The user-friendly interface allows anyone (even yours truly) to be enough of a graphic designer to meet their own needs. I highly recommend it!
This tool allows teachers to excel in Domain 3 of Danielson's Framework: Instruction. Teachers can create visual representations of concepts to help students engage better with the material and possibly make connections they could not make before. Even informational documents like mine featured on the left can keep large loads of information manageable and fun. Canva fits well into sub-domain 3A - Communicating with Students - as a teacher may create graphic designs to better reach their students, if that is how they best engage with the learning. Once again, a teacher must first know their students to know how to communicate with them, and Canva provides a great opportunity to do that. I can see myself using Canva in my future classroom to create posters for the walls and bulletin boards about unit objectives. I may also create introductory infographics for new and interesting concepts as a preview of the content before I start teaching it. Since Canva is designed to make it easy to create graphics that make information easy to handle, it is great for communicating with students. My students could also use Canva in my classroom. I could assign for them to create a project that presents a mathematical idea and provide Canva as a tool they could use; such a project would urge students to think about how to teach the information, ensuring they are engaging with it high on Bloom's Taxonomy. |
This tool definitely allows for exploration in the 4 Cs. Students (and teachers) creating designs and infographics must think critically about how best to present the information to their audience and how to bring attention to the main ideas. They must be creative in the most literal sense, as they experiment with design templates and visual appeal, but they must also be creative with the scaffolds they provide for readers and learners. Canva is a great tool for communication - between parents and teachers, for students, or for a professional learning network; even the simplest designs convey information, as explained above. For students using Canva, appropriate assignments exemplify the ISTE standard for students as creative communicators, as they must first decide whether to use Canva or another tool, simplify complex ideas into visual chunks, and customize their information to be appropriate for their audience.