In mid-April, 2025, TCEA hosted a Lunch and Learn session featuring Canva Learning Consultant, Monica Martinez. Monica gave attendees a thrilling sneak peek into the innovative updates announced at Canva Create, designed to empower educators and students. You will find features to support your lesson planning, engagement, and designing efforts.
What’s New in Canva?
Canva is leveling up, and rolling out, a suite of powerful tools. Many of the changes leverage GenAI. The features seek to make design more intuitive and integrated. While some features might be visible now, the full suite for Canva for Education accounts is expected to launch around May 20, 2025. More on that in a moment.
Here is what’s coming based on Monica’s Lunch and Learn presentation:
1. Canva Sheets: Forget complex formulas. Canva Sheets brings the power of spreadsheets but adds AI magic. Need to generate feedback for students based on their grades? Just ask AI. Want to bulk-create certificates from a list of names? Sheets makes it easier than ever.You can even drag and drop graphics directly into your sheets.
2. All-in-One Visual Suite (aka “Doctopus”): This was a crowd favorite among attendees. Imagine creating an entire lesson(documents, presentations, whiteboard activities, posters) all within one single Canva file. No more juggling multiple files for one project. I couldn’t help but observe that this is a game-changer. What’s more, it makes juggling multiple documents a thing of the past for both teacher planning and student portfolios. The reason why is that you have everything organized in one place. For example, here’s a document with the NEW button featuring the ability to add all sorts of documents:
3. Magic Studio at Scale: Apply Canva’s AI ‘Magic’ features more broadly across your designs. You can do bulk image background removals for groups of images, for example.
4. Canva Code: Ready to build your own interactive apps, games, quizzes, or websites without being a coding expert? Simply tell Canva Code what you want. For example, Monica demonstrated creating a game in Spanish. She described it as “create a matching game matching animals to their ecosystems,” showing the results. Customize existing tools or create something entirely new. You can share these creations via a website link.
Here are some of the resources shared, although you will definitely want to watch Monica’s step by step demonstration:
- Learn the Visual Suite
- Code with Canva Use Cases
- View the Lunch and Learn recording via the TCEA Community (TCEA membership required to access)
Need some foundational background in Canva? Register for the Canva Educator and Canva Specialist courses (not yet updated for this next round of updates) so you will be ready. You can also connect with Monica, who represents Canva:
More Features Announced
In watching the Canva Create event, there were many more feature announcements. Here are some I hastily wrote down:
- Easier diagram design
- Highlighting word and more in Canva Docs
- Send assignment to students
- Video feedback tools
- More slide transitions
- Resize images in bulk
- Subscript and superscript characters
- Text to Speech
- Voiceovers
- Brand color option constraints
There were many more features announced, but these little changes add up to BIG change overall.
Why the Wait?
Monica explained the May 20th rollout allows Canva to test features currently in beta. The means that educators and students will get a stable experience rather than a buggy roll-out. It also gives educators time to explore the upcoming tools.
Get Ready to Explore
Even though the full release is a few weeks away, you can start exploring! Monica shared resources (check the TCEA community site for the recording and links shared in the chat!) where you can:
- Learn about all the updates.
- Play with interactive demos of the new features and earn badges.
- Watch the Canva Create keynote and session recordings.
Everyone was buzzing about the potential of the all-in-one visual suite and Canva Code. Remember, all these powerful features will be 100% FREE under your Canva for Education account.