3 Back-to-School Canva Tips for Educators
If you’ve spent any time in my classroom, on my website, or at any of my faculty development workshops, it’s no secret that I am a major Canva enthusiast. Canva is one of my go-to digital design tools for creating dynamic educational materials.
What I love about Canva is that it allows me to create, copy, & store my own custom templates, which makes it easier than ever to create new materials on the fly. My branded templates, for slide decks, webpages, worksheets, etc., use all the same fonts, icons, & colors to create consistency across my teaching portfolio & professional materials. With these templates and my brand kit in hand, I can worry less about design and focus more on the content, which is key for busy educators juggling multiple courses simultaneously.
Today, I’m sharing three ways I use Canva to advertise my courses, customize my LMS, and create easily editable and shareable course materials.
Teasing & Advertising Your Courses
Do you need to drive enrollment to your courses or to the program or major that houses them? Designing course posters and video trailers can go a long way in capturing students’ attention and motivating them to register. Not only do these materials tease the content of the course, but they set the tone that you, as an educator, are willing to take the extra mile to design an engaging learning experience and have a handle on relevant digital tools. As a teacher of digital projects-based courses, showing students from the start that I consistently use the very design tools I’ll teach them to use is key.
Course Posters
In Monday’s post, I talked about how I teach composition with Marilyn Monroe. I first used Canva to design a simple poster to advertise the course to prospective students in 2023. While I do teach the occasional Hollywood-centric course, I don’t save creating materials inspired by the art of the movie poster just for them. You can see another poster I quickly created using a Canva template to advertise an American literature honors seminar I’m teaching this fall.
A course poster is easy to circulate online (on LinkedIn, on your portfolio website, etc.) and print out to hang on your door or department’s bulletin board. They also make great conversation starters and decor after the course has ended if you keep them framed or hung up inside your office or classroom.
Course Trailers
I love teasing my Marilyn Monroe class with a moment in 1962 that has never left our public imagination: the “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” serenade of JFK by Monroe, a few months before her untimely death. I wanted to create a quick teaser trailer that I could share on my course LMS and my website ahead of the semester starting. So, I used Canva to edit the historic clip into a trailer, interjecting language from my course description and using sound effects that give it a suspenseful feel.
“Mr. President, the late Marilyn Monroe.”
What I like most about this trailer is how it ends. I wanted not Monroe but Peter Lawford, who jokingly (but, now, hauntingly) introduces the tardy star as “the late Marilyn Monroe,” to be the last thing students hear. I wanted the various modes of the trailer - its words, its images, its sound effects, the delivery of Lawford’s introduction - to subtly gesture to the point of our course: interrogating the afterlives of a star who died too young but who we continue to obsess over.
Creating this course trailer was a fun, creative exercise. Don’t be intimidated by creating a video. The trailer is only a minute long, and it can be much shorter. You don’t have to appear in the video, and neither does your voice. Think about how you can curate and splice together relevant assets (photos, graphics, videos, & sounds) that relate to your course content. If video editing is not yet one of your skills, Canva has amazing templates that you can adapt to suit the tone and feel of your course.
Customize Your LMS with Buttons, Headers, & Graphics
If you’re not ready to create a full-fledged poster or trailer for your course, start with something small. I love using Canva to create assets for my course Canvas sites. I create custom headers & buttons to organize my homepage. This is really simple to do!
For the buttons, I start by creating a graphic in Canva. For example, for the course tabs where students navigate between the syllabus, calendar, office hours sign up, and resources, I simply found a file folder or tab graphic that I liked, changed the color to fit my usual color scheme, and added text on top. I then duplicated this page and changed the color and text as needed until all of my button graphics were created. I then added these images to my Canvas homepage (I inserted them into an empty table to keep them nice and organized), and then I added the links so that when students click on the graphic, it acts as a custom button that takes them to the proper page.
Customize Your Course Materials
Unless I am using Google Docs to create collaborative spaces for student writing, I use Canva to create most of my course materials. It makes creating accessible materials a breeze.
Slide Decks
If you, like me, have gotten a little tired of using Google Slides or Microsoft Powerpoint to create your slide decks, Canva is the answer. Instead of managing multiple files, I create a single slide deck for each of my courses that lasts all semester.
This makes it really easy to go back to the last period’s content if we need to review anything, and I can quickly access the full deck on any of my devices, including the desktops connected to the projectors in my classrooms. No flash drive needed! My decks are often image and video heavy, but I’ve had no issues with them loading quickly before class starts.
The deck is divided by day with simple agenda slides that are labeled with the day and tell students what is happening in class and what their homework is. If a student misses class or if there is material you want to share with students or other faculty, it’s easy to download and circulate a PDF of select slides.
At the end of the semester, I download a PDF of the deck and upload it to my teaching archive in my Google Drive. If I teach a new variation of the course, I copy the deck and make any required updates. Throughout the semester, I’ll add my thoughts on the lesson plans to the notes feature, including information like timing/pacing, changes for next time, and questions students have that I need to address upfront.
Documents with Live Links
I never upload static PDFs of my course calendar to my Canvas site. Instead, I create all of my course documents (syllabus, calendar, & major assignment prompts) as Canva docs that I share using a live link. This makes updating things so much easier. Notice a typo? Do you need to adjust a due date? No need to edit the PDF, delete the old file, and upload the new one. Simply make the edit in Canva, and the changes are immediately visible using the same link.
All of my documents stay organized in folders that I create in Canva for each course, and these folders are grouped by semester.
Get Started
Creating a free Canva account is a low-stakes investment that pays off significantly. If you’ve ever wanted to create your own resources or educational materials but don’t know where to start, Canva has a wealth of templates and guides that can help you get started and take the guesswork out of design so you can focus on the content. If you find you like Canva and use it often, a pro subscription gives you access to even more tools and content.
And don’t forget that you can make Canva work for you, too! You can always take what you learn about creating educational materials for your students with Canva and apply it to creating your own professional materials. If you want to see more examples of how I use Canva to create materials for my teaching portfolio, click the buttons below.
What are your Canva tips or questions? Let me know in the comments below. Alternatively, if you or your department is interested in hosting a Canva workshop for your faculty, please reach out to gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.
As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.
