Since today’s class was online, we each got to explore an “activity” of our choosing. These consisted of Ed Camps, Audacity, Canva, and a few other digital resources. I decided to explore Canva as I had used it before but didn’t really know the extent of what it could be used for. After watching some of the tutorials and reading through the slideshows, I saw how useful canvas can be as a future educator in the classroom!

The only time I had used Canva before this was to make posters and brochures for my leadership class in highschool. I had never really explored other templates and definitely did not think of using it to make my own digital classroom. After watching the tutorial on how to build a virtual classroom on Canva, I began searching through the templates available. I don’t have the premium version which meant that I was quite limited to what templates I could use. Still, even with these limitations, I still found there was a lot of resources I could use to organization and design my classroom the way I wanted to. I loved that I could change the colouring of each object so that it could fit the aesthetics that I liked. I also think it would be fun to use this technique to made a virtual model of your actual classroom so that students can make that connection.

My Virtual Classroom via Canva

If I were to use this platform in my own classroom I think I would use it for agendas. In my grade 4/5 Link2Practice classroom our teacher writes the students reminders on a blank word document, which the students then copy down. I think that using the “board” on your virtual classroom would be a more engaging and fun way to do this. I also think that it would be useful if there was ever a time that class had to be moved onto zoom or another online platform, for students to still feel like they are in a class setting. Additionally, this could be useful for a student who missed a class and could access this screen for announcements over email or another online method of communication.

Overall I think that Canva is a really great tool to use in the classroom. There is so much you can do with it even if you just have the free version. Definitely will be adding this to my teacher resources for future uses!

*Also peep my very casual Bitmoji fit. Maybe it’s comfy day at school?*