Activate Your Students' Creativity!

    

    I used to write articles for the class wall magazine during my senior high school time. The most exciting time for me at that time was when I need to design the layout of my articles or when we need to decorate our wall magazine. Now, the wall magazine has shifted into a website. I doubt if there is still a school using wall magazines to announce information or to publish their students' writing in Jakarta. As I become a teacher, the experience inspires me to believe that the excitement of designing the layout of a piece of writing may also motivate my students to do their writing. So, I introduced them to Canva and asked them to use it to present their writing projects. Wait...you might wonder what Canva is 😬. I will first describe what Canva can do for teachers and present to you how it can help teachers to activate our students' creativity.

    Canva is an online text design editorial tool that facilitates you to create various functional types of texts, such as brochures, advertisements, flyers, posters, invitations, infographics, etc. There are templates provided for us to begin our design. Even though not all templates are free to use, we still can create nice designs with the available ones. Before you begin, create an account with your email. Then, you can start your design by choosing which text you want to create. Below are the options available in Canva. Surprisingly, We can also create video and presentation designs with Canva!

So, what this design tool can do for teachers?

    You will agree with me that presenting our teaching materials matters in the class. Students will likely be more motivated when they are pleased by the nice visualization of lesson materials. By that, we hope that our students will be more engaged in learning. These are things we can do with Canva to create our teaching materials.

✅ Creating a nice presentation

    We can use plenty of presentation templates. No need again to search for images or download PowerPoint templates. There will also be animation features you can apply to make your slides catchy. I made one presentation example here .You will get the information on how to use Canva by clicking the link 😉

✅ Recording our virtual presentation

    I have just found out about this function! This app allows us to embed our video on the page we presented. We can record our screen with our face appearing while we are talking. It reminds me of screencast-o-matic. The difference is that with Canva we can record ourselves directly in our presentation slides, just like what we can do in PowerPoint. However, I found that using Canva is simpler because we can create a nice presentation without confusing the decoration attributes. It is all there in one place! I tried to record a short video to give you a picture of what it looks like.

There is something you need to pay attention to during the recording. Make sure that you fully position your face on the circle camera window. 

                   

Now let's see how teachers can activate students' creativity with Canva! 

✅ Let them beautify their writing layout

    I will now share what I have tried to do in the class. Writing a simple report text  (a text describing things in general) is one of the learning outcomes for 9 graders in my country. The infographic templates in Canva inspired me to assign my students to summarize their report text and present them in an infographic version. The class was online, so I asked them to share their report text infographic on the screen while they were presenting what they wrote. Here is a sample of my students' work ⇓

✅ Let them Collaborate to Design a Text 

    Again, the templates in Canva suggested me a new idea! I found advertisement templates on Canva and I knew that they will provide my students with creative space to create their task of writing a short advertisement text. I was about to assign this task individually until I figured out the possibility to collaborate in Canva! I decided to assign this task in pairs and encourage my students to try to work together to write and design their advertisement brochures. This is one of the works ⇓

    You might need to explain to your students how to work collaboratively in Canva. Tell them they need to send an invitation link to their friends' email or type on their friends' email to join the team they made. 

    Finally, I have presented what Canva can do for us and our students! It is definitely promoting creativity for both teachers and students. But is there something we may concern about the use of it?

    For me, of course, it is good to have an instant editing tool that provides us with various ready-made designs. But I think it is fair enough to consider the design we or our students made as a non-original creation. We do not really make them, we just arrange attributes Canva provided to design our content. Another limitation will just be like the other online learning tools, it is limitedly free, if you want to free yourself to use anything there then you need to unlock the limitation by buying their subscription package. 

sources:

Images: https://www.pexels.com/

personal documents 

Screenshot : Canva.com