Supercharge Your Canva Projects

If you’ve been in the classroom these past few years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a peer or coach recommend Canva, the digital design platform that allows users to create posters, slides, social media posts, and much more.

“Canva has become a one-stop shop for me,” says instructional coach and Chinese teacher Shengnan “Penny” Ma—and the phrase “one-stop shop” was echoed by several Canva users I spoke with. Even experienced users likely have more to learn about the platform: Canva has been steadily rolling out new features since it launched in 2013, and the wide scope of its offerings makes it easy to miss a tool that could help streamline your workflow.

Today, Canva has an entire suite of tools under the label Canva for Education, and K–12 educators—and students—can access pro features for free after signing up on the site and getting their school affiliation verified. Canva’s educational resource library, which has worksheets, presentations, and even entire lessons—organized by subject, grade, and resource type—is great for newcomers.

But what about teachers who already use the platform? I spoke to power users to gather pro tips that can help you supercharge your Canva usage. Here’s what they recommend.

Level Up Your Graphic Design

Graphic design is Canva’s bread and butter; it’s why many educators try the platform in the first place. But there’s a good chance many of them are overlooking some of Canva’s most useful design capabilities.

Magic Erase: If you need to edit a photo to use on a poster or slide, Magic Erase can automatically remove any part of the image that you highlight, making it look as though it was never there. Canva also offers a tool that can remove the entire background.

Magic Edit: If you find an image that’s close to what you need but not quite there, Magic Edit allows you to highlight a part of that image, then type a prompt for what you want to replace it with. You could, for example, replace a dog in the background of an image with a cat.

Magic Morph: If you’re making a poster for a bake sale, Magic Morph can transform the letters of the words “Bake Sale” into images of cookies while preserving the letters’ shapes, says teacher and digital learning coach Erika Sandstrom.

Magic Switch: After making a poster, if you want to promote the same event with an Instagram post or a temporary banner on your school’s Facebook page, you don’t have to go back to the drawing board. Magic Switch can automatically reposition and resize the elements to create outputs that look good in other formats and sizes, too, says instructional design coach Alyssa Faubion.

Get a Head Start on Presentations

Many teachers also turn to Canva to create slide presentations; the site offers thousands of colorful presentation templates. Ma has a pro tip: You can design a rough draft slide presentation from a single prompt with Canva’s AI Magic Design tool. For example, after opening a blank presentation, type a prompt like “second-grade-level presentation about the planets of the solar system” into the search bar. Canva will show you complete presentations on the topic that other users have created, and offer a couple AI-generated templates you can use to create your own, with relevant images and text on each slide.

Due to the unpredictability of AI, the template’s text might be irrelevant or even outright false: “Don’t take it for granted, because a lot of times they might give you the wrong information,” Ma warns. However, the general structure and design of the presentation will be something you can build on with your own writing, Ma says, significantly streamlining the presentation design process.

Additionally, Ma likes to use some of the website’s keyboard shortcuts when delivering her presentations—like ‘B’ to blur the current slide, ‘C’ for a confetti animation on top of the current slide, ‘Q’ to display a shushing emoji with a “shhh” sound effect, and any number from 1 to 9 to set a timer that many minutes.

Automatically Translate to Other Languages

Whether using AI or making a design from scratch, most readers will probably be creating their Canva designs in English—but Ma notes that Canva has a feature that can instantly translate an entire design’s text into another language, with over 100 languages supported. While it may make mistakes, this feature may be useful for language teachers or students, Ma says, as well as educators creating posters or handouts that will be seen by families who don’t speak English.

Create Your Own Images

If you want to generate an image from scratch, Canva now has that capability as well, with its Magic Media text-to-image tool. This image generator has plenty of applications, teachers tell us—I explored a few in the video below.

After a creative writing activity, K–5 technology teacher and edtech expert Joe Merrill has had students use Magic Media to design a poster showing what their story would look like as a video game. He created an editable template; students can create an image with Magic Media by typing in a prompt relevant to their story. Similarly, middle school ELA teacher and edtech expert Kristin Merrill has had students create magazine covers to accompany chapter summaries. Students will likely have to try a few prompts before getting an output that fits well, the Merrills (who are married) note; this helps students think about how to distill the main idea of a text into just a few words.

Check Out Teacher-Created Templates

While AI can be helpful, teachers often benefit the most from resources created by other teachers. Canva allows people to create educational resources and post them for others to use—like TeachersPayTeachers, Sandstrom says, except the resources on Canva are free.

Many of these teacher-created resources take the form of editable templates that educators can customize to their own needs. For example, Sandstrom created “Breathing Bubbles,” a meditation template. It features an animated bubble that expands and contracts, prompting the viewer to inhale, hold, and exhale for three seconds each—but first, teachers and students can customize the bubble with a picture of their dog or their favorite sports team’s logo, and update the background to show a place that brings them peace. Other popular templates include class schedules, graphic organizers, and blank comic strips.

Make Use of Handy Text Features

While ChatGPT remains in the spotlight, Canva now has its own text generator, called Magic Write, built into its text editor. Magic Write can help educators draft emails, handouts, schedules, and more. Users can also highlight a piece of text, then use Magic Write to automatically edit its tone—making it more concise, more formal, or more fun.

This is useful for administrative and lesson-planning tasks, but teachers might be hesitant to give students access to a tool that can write on their behalf—or alter the tone of their writing with the click of a button. However, Faubion found that the tool gave high school students with learning disabilities more confidence in their writing; they were thrilled to see Magic Write recommend rewrites to their sentences around spelling and grammar, and even build on their ideas with its “Continue writing” option. As a result, these students felt empowered to write more, Faubion says—the tech helped them feel less worried about making mistakes.