Canva: A Tool for Design

I talked about quite a few tools used for language teaching and learning in the previous posts, and in this post I will deal with a tool basically used for design.  However, it can be equally deployed in language teaching and learning too. This is a web tool called Canva, which can be used to create designs for your presentation, book cover, social media posts, cover page illustrations for the book, a specific design for the project etc. It is a tool to yield super good-looking layout as all the design templates in this tool are literally appealing. Another feature is it’s easy to adapt the given design using the templates. The variety of designs and fonts are other salient features of Canva.

If you are thinking of using it for teaching and learning, you can develop ample teaching learning materials quite comfortably through Canva. You can produce visual materials through it. As regards visual materials, Walker and White (2013) citing the study of Wall et. al (2005) on use of visuals of Interactive White Board maintains that the learners felt that they learnt the lesson better through the use of visuals. Visuals have power to enable the learners to associate any abstract concepts they come across with some meaningful frame. And in this case, for the teachers, Canva’s affordance help them to design materials which help to clarify the abstract concept to the learners..

How to create:

It is more a drag and drop activity to create any designs in Canva. Go to www.canva.com and sign up for your account. Next, you will be led to its home page where you can choose custom dimension. Choose one of the dimensions, for instance, presentation or a book cover, i.e., to say any specific design that you are thinking of creating. Now, you will see the Canva layout from where you can drag and drop to the create section. And having dropped the layout, you will adapt the designs as necessary and create the design you have expected.

For further details, you can watch this tutorial video.

This is the book cover that I have designed through Canva. 

All tools have both advantages and limitations. The advantages and limitations of Canva are explained in bullets below.

Advantages:

1.    You can create visually appealing design for your presentation, project, book etc.

2.    It’s easy to handle as it has a drag and drop feature.

3.    This tool is free, so anyone can use it without having financial burden.

4.    You can also give a project work to the students and ask them to have designs using it.

Limitations:

1.    Some pictures which are available in it are not free.

2.    Students may overuse the designs as they find they can produce a lot of illustrations in a short interval.

3.    In the presentation slides, you cannot add transition and animations even if the interface seems super attractive.

I hope this brief post has helped you to understand little about Canva. Considering the ample advantages and these few limitations, if you plan to use Canva for your own teaching and learning, I am sure you will find it really useful to engage your learners in your tasks and/or in your materials.

Walker, A. & White, G. (2013). Technology enhanced language teaching: Connecting theory and practice. Oxford: OUP.