Canva is amazing! It is a one-stop show for finding templates, finding graphics, creating presentations, creating short videos, finding useable images, creating manipulatives, and so much more. I cannot say enough about how great of a tool it is for #elmused educators.

This will be a short and sweet blog to show one highlight of Canva and to give you resources of where to find more.

Free Educator’s Account

Canva has a free educator’s account that gives you more than the free version. It also gives you many of the items in the paid version. To be eligible for the free educator’s account, you need to register here with a school email address.

Concert Programs

This week, our after-school conservatory held two recitals for their Term 2 students and families. Our school has had an after-school conservatory for 20 years. We have 5 adjunct professors who come after school two to five days a week, to teach students piano, voice, drums, clarinet, flute, saxophone, ukulele, guitar, and bass. This year, we had over 50 students in grades preschool through grade seven take lessons in packages of 5, 7, 10, and 14, and participate in a recital at the end of Term 1 (January) and at the end of Term 2 (June).

When I wanted to create a recital program, I looked no further than Canva. I placed “programs” in the search tool and found several “Concert Programs” templates appear. The highlight I want to make about the concert programs templates are as follows:

• Many of them have text boxes that are grouped and ready for you to replace with your text.

• If you adapt the template, the format will become unaligned. However, Canva makes it easy to realign the program.

• Highlight the text boxes you want to align. If the boxes are not grouped, I will group them. For example, I would group the following:

• I would adapt with my own text, as well as copy and paste the text boxes to add additional ones.

• Now that the text boxes are unaligned and all over the place, I highlight them, click on “Position”, click on “Tidy Up” and then look at how nicely that looks.

• If I am using a border like in the example above, I would click “Tidy Up” and then align to the left to make it look nice and clean with the border.

• Now, the program looks clean and I can make last-minute adjustments using the “Tidy Up” function if needed.

Want to Learn More?

Katie Wardrobe of Midnight Music held a webinar earlier this year titled, 5 Fantastic Designs Teachers Can Create With Canva. She also created an online course about Canva titled, Create Beautiful Teaching Resources - with Canva, where you can work through her course as professional development to learn the ins-and-outs of Canva!

If you are working in a Private School in NJ, I will be presenting about Canva for educators in the upcoming NJAIS Innovation and Collaboration Conference on August 9 and 10.

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