Cool Tool Review #1 - Canva

For my first Cool Tool Review blog post, I am reviewing the design application, Canva. Creating a visual or a poster is an excellent learning activity that can be utilized in nearly any subject area. My hope was that Canva would provide an easy to use digital medium that students could use to organize pictures, graphics and text so that they could efficiently present and share their ideas visually. Canva is a free to use, browser based application that is also accessible through the app store. I used both the browser based application as well as the iPhone app in my testing.

When you first visit Canva.com, you are prompted to make a free account. Easy enough - once you've logged in, however, the options can be a little daunting. Do I want to create a poster? banner? post card? collage? resume? YouTube banner? This place seems to have a template for everything, but what if I just want to play around and create something from a blank slate? In order to start playing with the tools and options Canva has to offer, I select poster - it seems like the safest bet.

Once I've made my selection, I am presented with the drag and drop design interface. I am pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to drag and drop the pictures and design elements I want on the left to my blank canvas on the right. 

I find the drag and drop interface easy enough to use. There are a few hang ups here and there when I attempt to insert text, but for the most part everything is fluid. I would feel confident teaching students age 10 and up how to use this application to collage photos and words together to create a graphic. The nice thing about using Canva, as opposed to something like PowerPoint, is that once the student starts a project on Canva, their progress is saved and can resumed anywhere that they can log into their account. This means that they can start working on a poster at school, continue their work at home on an iPad, then finish it in class the next day. 

If you click on the "free photos" icon, a scroll of thousands of free photos pops up for you to select from. Despite the large library of free photos, the odds of you actually finding a photo you want to use without using the search feature is pretty small. For example, say I want to use a picture of a piece of pizza for my collage. I can type in pizza into the search bar and a handful of free to use pizza graphics pop up. 

You'll find that as you continue to scroll, however, you'll have to pay a dollar a piece for most of the pictures, as seen here. 

This payment system is utilized in all areas of the application, from layouts to picture frames to graphs and graphics, there are free options and then there are premium options that need to be paid for. The application seems to be targeted at businesses that want to use the program as an efficient way to create designs for their business without hiring a designer, so this makes sense. Using other people's art is usually not free! As you can see in the photo above, however, there is a tab called "uploads" where students can upload and insert their own photos and graphics. Interested, I tried it out for myself! 

Uploading original photos to the application was easy and within seconds, I was able to start dragging my own photos into grids, creating simple collages with text and graphics. Since students will be using this program for educational purposes and not for profit, they could easily import google images into this program as well. When using the application from a phone or tablet, Canva can easily access the photo library to import photos taken on cell phones as well. Below are the two documents I created with a couple hours of fooling around with the program. 

Coming from a digital art background, I was a little frustrated with the lack of control I had over my images using this program. I mean, Canva is by no means Adobe Photoshop. But it is not supposed to be. Canva is an easy to use program that can allow people with limited technological experience and design ability to independently create graphics. From that perspective, I was pretty impressed. The most important part of this application, to me, is that it was easy to use and understand. The interface is intuitive and when you click things, they do what you expect them to do. When you click an image, for example, a grid pops up which allows you to resize the image or move it. When you click on text, a cursor pops up which allows you to modify the text. If you hi light something and press delete, it dissapears. 

The Verdict: Would Recommend

Canva wasn't perfect in my testing with it. The app froze up occasionally and had some limitations as far as design power goes. Sometimes, these design limitations were frustrating because the program would ask you to upgrade your account to a premium subscription in order to access certain features. That being said, Canva was very easy to learn and use. I could imagine realistically utilizing Canva in my classroom for students to create quick graphics that pertain to a project we are completing in class. Creating visuals is an excellent way to reinforce material learned in class, and I think that students will respond well to this easy to use online application.