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Using Canva for Student Creation

Over the last year, I have seen some posts by Bill Ferriter, on using Canva as a tool for creating nice presentations and posters using Creative Commons Licensed photos from Flickr. The Canva site is free (there is also an iPad app), and is a great way to let students demonstrate what they know in creative ways, one of the goals of Digital Age Learning. By using the Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr, you are getting pretty high quality, and most are licensed for use with attribution. Of course, if the student can use their own picture, that is the prefered option!

Here are a couple I came up with:



Recently there has been great turmoil in Yemen, and one of the leadership groups there is called Houthi. Reminded me a bit of Darius Rucker!


I created this next one during a meeting, sitting next to Doug Johnson. He had just commented on the importance of Visual Literacy, and how sometimes visuals are created that mean very little. I've tweaked it over the last few weeks, finally settling on this image that I took a month ago.

Canva has templates for posters as well as presentations, and is a quick and easy way for students to express themselves. I know that Bill has used it with his 6th graders, and has found it to be pretty intuitive and easy to use with them.

Students should know that there is free content on the site, but that some premium features do cost money. Another reason to try to use your own images if you can!

Give it a try, and let me know what you come up with!

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