A couple of months ago, I wrote about Canva, which is a free graphic design and publishing tool that provides a variety of templates and access to hundreds of thousands of free-to-use photos and graphics. This week, I want to highlight some of the ways you (or your students) can use Canva to make presentations more fun and engaging. I also put together a collection of quick tutorials (about 1:00 each) demonstrating these and other specific features and tools in Canva. Feel free to use these yourself or share the whole playlist with the students! I will continue to add to it as needed.
Present & Record
We all know (hopefully) that your slideshow shouldn't be jam-packed with text. But what if a student is absent and missed out on the spoken part of your presentation? Or what if they were in class, but their mind wandered for a few minutes? Sharing your presentation only provides some of the information. But with Canva, you can record yourself while you present! Select Present and Record from the Present menu. You can choose to record with your webcam or just your microphone. When you are finished, you will get a link to the recording. You can then share this video on Google Classroom. Students could even use this feature to practice before doing a presentation in front of the class!
Built-in Timers
Do you ever stop your presentation and give students 5 minutes to discuss or work on something? You might set a timer on your watch or phone. You might Google "5 minute timer". In Canva...just hit the number "5" on your keyboard and a 5-minute timer will pop up on your presentation. (Same thing for the numbers 1-9...anywhere from a 1-minute to a 9-minute timer.) If you hit "0", you get a 3-second timer.
Magic Effects
These are a little more gimmicky, but might be useful to you. When you are giving a Canva presentation, hit the following keys to get some fun effects: "B" - Blur the screen "Q" - Quiet 🤫 "C" - Confetti "D" - Drumroll "U" - Curtain "M" - Mic Drop
"O" - Bubbles
Animations
You can apply animations to all different elements in Canva to make your presentations more visually appealing. A cool time-saving feature is that you can preview the animations simply by hovering over them.
If you are comfortable using Google Slides or Powerpoint...Canva can do anything those programs can do plus much more. Consider taking some time to learn this tool to save yourself a lot of time in the long run!
Comments