If you’re short on time but still want to create student activities that are fun, meaningful, and engaging, Canva can help you do it in minutes. Between planning, grading, and everything in between, creating interactive classroom materials often falls at the bottom of the to-do list. That’s where Canva Education comes in! Canva makes it quick and easy to design activities that get students involved without starting from scratch or needing graphic design skills.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to: 

• Explore Canva’s ready-made education templates
• Customize templates to fit your classroom 
• Design interactive digital activities
• Boost student collaboration
• Streamline your teacher workflows

Explore Canva’s Ready-Made Education Templates

To create student activities in Canva, let’s first dive into all of the hundreds of ready made templates inside of Canva. It’s easy to navigate all of the templaes because they are organized by subject, grade level and resource type. This helps you find designs that are more relevant to your classroom needs. 

Once you select a subject, grade, or resource type, you can further customize the results with filters. You can filter by grade, resource type, language, topic, and color. 

To access the templates, you can click here or navigate to your Canva dashboard and select ‘Education’. 

To narrow your search, use keywords in the search bar to look up specific templates, such as student worksheets, which can be customized for any subject. A few of our favorite templates to search for are graphic organizers and choice boards. 

You can even be more specific by typing in the subject, such as ancient Egypt. 

Once you find a template you would like to use, click on it and scroll through the different pages of the template so you can see what’s available. Many of these templates are created by educators for educators, so they’re already aligned with real classroom use. You can use them as is or remix them to match your goals. 

Now, let’s look at how to create customized templates to fit your classroom needs!

How to Customize Templates for Your Classroom

Now on to the fun part…customizing templates!

Let’s say you found a choice board template you like. Now, it’s time to make it your own!

Once you click on the template, a preview box will pop up. Select the button, “Customize this template”. 

This will add the template to your dashboard. Next, we recommend renaming the file so you can easily find it later. To rename the file, select “File” in the top left corner and click on the title. 

You can change the colors and fonts to match your classroom branding, school mascot colors, or just your personal style. To change the fonts, select a text box, and in the top toolbar that appears, click on the font name. 

A box will pop out and you can search for a specific font or scroll through the list to find one you like. Simply, click on the font and your design will be updated. 

To change the colors, you can either select each element and change the color that way with the top toolbar, or you can change all of the colors in your design with one click by using a brand kit. 

If you haven’t added a color palette to your brand inside of Canva, all you have to do is navigate to “Brand” on the left toolbar and select “Add your brand colors”. 

Once you have a palette, you will be able to click on it and it will change your design’s colors. You can continue to click on the palette until you see a color combination that you like. 

Edit Template Content

To continue customizing, you can edit the text by swapping out placeholder content for your own instructions, vocabulary terms, or activity ideas. Just click on a text box and start editing!

You can also add engaging elements like icons, stickers, arrows, or photos from Canva’s built-in library to visually support learners. 

To access these, navigate to “Elements” in the left-hand toolbar. A side-bar menu will pop out, and you can search for the specific element that you’re looking for. In the picture below, you can see that we searched for “earth” and the results that popped up. Then, you can further refine the results by selecting the element type (graphics, photos, videos, audio, etc.). 

Once you find an element that you like, just select it to add it to your design and resize it. 

Customize any template to your learning objectives, student interests, or to accommodate for diverse learners. 

Design interactive digital activities

With Canva, it’s easy to create interactive, student friendly digital activities. In just a few clicks, you can transform any template into an engaging learning experience. 

You can add to a template or build a new activity by using Canva’s elements and graphics to build drag and drop activities like vocabulary matching, sorting tasks, or categorizing challenges. 

Another option is to design interactive tools like digital science journals or graphic organizers for thinking and learning. 

You can use Canva’s “share as template” link to send a version to students so they can edit their own copy without changing the original.

To share an activity as a template, navigate to the “Share” button in the top right corner. Once you click on that a window will appear. Below the “Copy Link” button, select the three dots icon for “See all”. 

Once the new options appear, click on “Template link”. 

Then, click on the “Create template link” button to create the link and select “Copy”. 

You will be able to send this link to students and it will make a unique copy for them that they can edit. 

Boost student collaboration

One of Canvas’s biggest superpowers is student collaboration. You can invite students to co-create in real time. Whether they’re working on a group presentation, designing a timeline or a poster, or creating a visual reflection journal, Canva makes collaboration seamless, even for younger learners. 

 It’s perfect for collaborative presentations, project-based learning, or even extension activities.

To share an activity for student collaboration, navigate to the “Share” button in the top right corner, and click on the search bar under “People with access”. 

This will pop open a new window and you can add the names or emails of your students in the search box. 

To make this step quicker, you can create a group of your students and add them to a design with one click. Here are the directions on how to create a group. 

Streamline your Teacher Workflows

You can also use Canva to streamline teacher workflows. Canva has a robust resource library of templates. You can make classroom signs, parent newsletters, anchor charts, set up monthly calendars or design bulletin board displays. 

Just search in Canva’s templates and tons of options will pop up that you can customize following the same steps above. 

Once you’ve created these, you can duplicate and repurpose them each year. 

This saves time and keeps your learning environment consistent. 

Creating student activities doesn’t have to be time consuming. With Canva, you can start with a ready made template, customize it in minutes, and turn it into something your students will love. From interactive choice boards to collaborative group projects, Canva makes it easy to bring creativity and engagement into your classroom…without adding hours to your workload.

✨ Create Engaging Student Activities in Canva: Pick one Canva template (like a choice board or graphic organizer), customize it for your next lesson, and see how quickly you can turn it into something your students will love.

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