Canva: an artFul teaching tool for the modErn teacher
This week, our challenge was to create an educational poster using the app (which also has a website) called Canva. Canva can be found in the App Store as an app for your Mac products for free or can be used through their website. I chose to create a history lesson supplement with a Benjamin Franklin poster seen above. The purpose of this app is to provide a platform for people to create and design a variety of projects.
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This app can be helpful in the classroom by engaging students in ways that traditional assessment struggles. By giving students a more visual option to prove their content knowledge, teachers can reach students who learn more visually. Teachers can also offer this as an option for taking notes during lecture so that visual learners can stay focused and retain more information. Students using this form of creation could increase engagement in the classroom setting by giving students the opportunity to recreate historic scenes or show a visual interpretation of a thought process during essay writing.
One of the most important things to note about this app is its ability to be as simple or as complicated as you want for a lesson, project, or anything you can imagine. Students as young as kindergarten (with some verbal assistance) would be able to easily navigate this app due to its simple design and instructions, but even college students could benefit from its ability to go into higher level development options. This app also is easy to learn and easy to master with built in tutorials as soon as you sign up, as well as tons of resources online that can offer assistance.
One of the most important things to note about this app is its ability to be as simple or as complicated as you want for a lesson, project, or anything you can imagine. Students as young as kindergarten (with some verbal assistance) would be able to easily navigate this app due to its simple design and instructions, but even college students could benefit from its ability to go into higher level development options. This app also is easy to learn and easy to master with built in tutorials as soon as you sign up, as well as tons of resources online that can offer assistance.
The pros of this app include a simple design, lots of easy to access support, content that can be used by all ages, tons of free content that students would not have to worry about purchasing accidentally while logged in, and ease of access over different kinds of devices because of its iOS and android apps. The cons, well, honestly I can only think of one, and that is the touchscreen intensive design which may be difficult for some students to master. The bottom line is this app would be immensely beneficial for classroom use, especially in a one to one school setting.
Produced through our app of the week, Canva!