Emma Pass
Google Certified Trainer & Innovator
Hybrid English Teacher & Author of The Hybrid Teacher
Members of the Canopy team, Emma Pass and Andrew Caffrey, recently attended the Canva Create 2024 conference held in Los Angeles. While the In-N-Out burgers were great, Canva’s new tools and improvements designed to enhance user experience, streamline workflows, and provide innovative solutions for both educational and administrative purposes really stole the show and made the trip well worth it. Below are the key takeaways from the conference, highlighting how these updates can benefit schools and educators.
New Canva Layout
The sleek new Canva layout makes it easier for even our youngest students to navigate tools, text, and elements. The redesigned layout is more intuitive and less bulky, making it more accessible to all users. The classic overhead toolbar now only shows tools relevant to the selected element type, enhancing usability.
Canva Enterprise
Canva is rolling out an “Enterprise” account for businesses. While it will remain free for education, this new access could provide more varied setup options for districts and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) that require different settings and access for various user groups.
Canva Work Kits
Although primarily business-focused, Canva’s new Work Kits provide role-specific templates that can be useful for administrative roles such as HR and marketing departments. Work Kits could also be valuable for vocational training programmes, giving students a realistic understanding of the tasks involved in these roles.
Canva Courses
Teachers can already build dedicated, self-paced online courses in Canva using a combination of presentations, videos, worksheets, and more. The new update allows teachers to track user progress through the course, making it easier to identify which students are engaging and which might need additional support.
Canva Docs
Canva Docs is improving with new tools such as suggestions for student feedback, allowing teachers to make specific edits within the document rather than just leaving comments on the side. Additionally, Canva Magic Switch enables turning a slide deck into different formats with a single click.
Canva Magic Whiteboards
Teachers needing a new virtual collaborative whiteboard will appreciate the AI upgrade to Canva Magic, which now allows for sorting all sticky notes by topic with a single click, enhancing organisation and efficiency.
Magic Grab
Teachers familiar with Canva Grab, which uses AI to separate the foremost image for easy manipulation, will benefit from the new Canva Magic Grab upgrade. This upgrade allows for selecting any image in a photo to separate from the whole, making it easy to remove students without media releases from school social media photos.
AI Image Generator
Canva Magic is also upgrading its AI text-to-image tool, which can now generate exclusive graphics. This allows for quickly creating icons and graphic images for worksheets and presentations, providing ample visual aids for effective learning.
Video
The new Canva Magic upgrade includes enhanced voice features that quiet background audio from recordings. This improvement is particularly useful for students working on video projects in shared spaces, ensuring better audio quality.
Conclusion
The updates from the Canva Create 2024 conference showcase how Canva continues to innovate and provide valuable tools for both educational and administrative purposes. Equally important, Canva remains free for education, ensuring that these powerful tools are accessible to all schools. The vision to make the world a better place at the heart of Canva truly shone through in each panel and presentation at Canva Create 2024, reflecting a genuine commitment to improving the educational experience and supporting educators and students worldwide.
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