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Exploring Canva Whiteboard as a Jamboard Alternative

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Wish you had an easy-to-use online whiteboard? With Google moving Jamboard to read-only mode on October 1, 2024, you may be seeking out an alternative. What digital, online whiteboard will you use with your students instead? If you are a “less is more” kind of person, you may be looking for easier tools to use than those suggested by Google (e.g., Figjam, LucidSpark, Miro). Let’s look at one you may want to know more about: Canva Whiteboard.

What is Canva Whiteboard?

Canva Dashboard

The simple-to-use Canva Whiteboard is already a part of the toolset you know and love in Canva. Canva Whiteboard offers a simple solution with powerful components, like built-in timers and more. Once you start using it, you may find yourself thanking Google for pushing you out of the Jamboard nest. Canva offers so many delightful features that are free to verified educators, and its whiteboard tool is a worthy replacement for Jamboard. Let’s walk through some of the Jamboard-compatible features Canva Whiteboard offers. Here’s a quick video overview:

Import Images or Presentations

Save your Google Jamboards as images for an easy upload to Canva Whiteboard. Or, upload any image file you’d like to use (keeping licensing and copyright in mind, of course)!

Google Jamboard content being saved as a PNG

Here’s one of my favorite activities as a Google Slide, the 3-2-1 activity (3 main ideas/words, 2 supporting details/phrases, and 1 question/quote). You can vary this activity in many ways! I can download it as an image and then upload it to my whiteboard in Canva for students to annotate. You can do this with any image you save or find.

Google Slides content being saved as a PNG
Save a Google Slide as an Image
Canva Whiteboard Image Upload
Upload Images to Canva

Get a few other Google Slides activities here that can be exported and use in an online whiteboard of your choice.

Yes, you can download presentations as PNG or image files and upload them to Canva, but wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to? In Canva Whiteboard, you can import a presentation straight from Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or Dropbox and turn it into a whiteboard.

  1. Click the menu icon in the top left corner.
  2. Open Projects.
  3. Click Add New in the top right corner.
  4. Choose Import from app in the drop-down menu.
  5. Choose to import from Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox.
How to import presentations from an app in Canva

You can change it to a whiteboard in Canva by right-clicking a slide and choosing Expand to Whiteboard in the drop-down menu.

How to expland a Canva Presentation to a Whiteboard

Lock the Background

In Canva, like in Jamboard, you can lock the background. This ensures your students won’t be able to move the background around as they are using the whiteboard. Click the image and select the lock in the toolbar, or right-click the image and select the lock in the drop-down menu.

Canva lock background options
Lock an image from the Canva toolbar.

Canva image drop down menu
Lock an image from the image drop-down menu.

Duplicate a Page

Now that you have your whiteboard slide looking the way you want, you’re ready to duplicate it.

How to duplicate a page in Canva Whiteboard

When you present or share your screen, as you’ll see in a bit, these pages will become available as slides. Students can write on these slides with the Draw tools in Canva. And, since you locked the background, that should help keep certain elements unmoveable, as you can see below:

Canva Locked Background example

Additionally, you can see students working live in the document. This makes it easier to monitor progress.

Everything ready to go? Now, you can bring students into the equation to add comments and annotations. To share the Canva Whiteboard, use the Share button that appears in the top right corner of the screen.

Canva's share menu

As you can see in the image above, the “Can Comment” is enabled, but you will want to change that to Edit. Remember, you can also share a presentation in Canva for groups of students to work on!

Note: If whiteboard vandalism is a concern, then you can take a more limited approach. That is, you can share the link to a whiteboard with only that group of students or an individual student.

Share Your Whiteboard as a Template

If you’d like to share your whiteboards as editable templates with other educators, you can do so by clicking Share and then clicking the Template Link option. This makes sharing your whiteboard designs easy. The only catch? To edit the template, you need to have a Canva account. That’s not a bad thing for colleagues since Canva is free for educators and students.

Share options in Canva

When you click on the icon for the template link, you will see a link to copy:

Example template link

Here’s what sharing a whiteboard as a template link looks like. Try out this editable template of my 3-2-1 whiteboard!

Did You Know?

Canva offers a desktop app that will run on your computer. This means you can work on your computer (e.g. Windows/Mac) with Canva creations outside of your browser. Get the app.

Add Text and Content to a Whiteboard

Once your students have access to Canva Whiteboard via the Share link, they can do so much. I almost wish Canva Whiteboard offered a limited set of tools for their whiteboard or a toggle switch for the tools available to keep choices simple for younger students.

This video gives you a big-picture overview:

Like some of my colleagues, when I heard Jamboard was going away, I worried I wouldn’t find an easy-to-use replacement. Thank goodness Canva’s Whiteboard solution is available and ready to go! Here are a few more Canva Whiteboard videos to get your brain moving in the right direction:

Please share any resources or whiteboards you have created in the comments. We’d love to hear how you’re using Canva Whiteboards!

Featured Image: Screenshot by author, Canva Dashboard.

All images within this article are screenshots by the author.

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View of various editable Newsletter Templates in Canva.
CommunicationContent CreationProfessional Learning

Three Canva Tools for Making PD Newsletters

by Dr. Bruce Ellis
written by Dr. Bruce Ellis

Canva has a lot of features that make it an easy choice as your go-to tool for creating and sharing professional development in digestible newsletters and on-the-go bits. We’ll get into the features for you to try in just a moment, and then I’ll share some critical bonus tips to keep in mind. These will come in handy if you want to share PD with peers who have crazy schedules but want to enhance their students’ learning experiences.

Three Canva Features to Try

1. Brand Kit

Canva has a ton of features to help you with a newsletter. Before using Canva, consider setting up your Brand Kit. This will allow you to predetermine the colors, logo, and default fonts that are used in your newsletters and graphics. Having the brand kit established will help your items look cohesive and unified as you continue to create and share meaningful content with your peers. For the brand kit, you will need the Pro or Educator account, which is free with verification for educators! Here is more information about setting up your brand kit to simplify the design process.

2. Templates and Magic Design

One of the main features is to make use of their templates. Begin by clicking on “Templates” on the left-hand navigation menu. Then, in the search box at the top of the window search “newsletter school” and hit Enter. You can use Magic Design to generate a newsletter template using an image you created or have already downloaded. Once you upload the image, it will pull together several newsletters for you to choose from that you can tweak to your liking. Once you get the base Canva newsletter design completed, you can easily duplicate it each time and use it for each issue of your newsletter. Here is a template of the one that I created as if I were in Hutto ISD, a neighboring school district to me.

Author-made newsletter template in Canva
Canva Template designed by the author with Magic Design

3. Magic Write

If you need help writing content for your newsletter, then consider making use of Magic Write, Canva’s own generative AI tool, to aid the process. To access Magic Write, open a design in Canva and add a text box or click on the text box you’d like to edit. In the text edit menu, you can choose Magic Write. Briefly describe what you want, and then click the Generate button. This can help you write informative but concise information to include in your newsletter. These can be step-by-step instructions, a motivational thought, ideas on a particular educational topic, or even icebreaker questions for teachers to use in their classroom.

Bonus Tips for Making Newsletters

Tip 1: Use Clear and Engaging Headlines

When creating tools for PD or making newsletters, use headlines that your peers can quickly scan, read, and relate to. Instead of being cute or clever, lean towards being more straightforward. When thinking about what topics to include, consider frequent subjects that come up in the teachers’ lounge. Also, consider touching base with the principal, lead teachers, and counselor for ideas. Then, start each graphic or newsletter with a clear and engaging headline to draw them in.

Tip 2: Amp Up the Visual Appeal

Marketers know that we pay attention to visuals before we even read the associated text. Use this to your advantage by using graphics and visuals that signify the topic in your newsletters. You can easily use Canva’s Text to Image tool to generate images that may be more specific than what you can find in their library. You can also upload images from other tools into Canva to create graphics, but be sure to note the licensing, as you may not have the rights to edit or use certain images.

For example, a newer AI tool that seems to be making a splash for creating amazing images is Ideogram.ai. It’s free to use and is probably the best AI graphic tool to add text to an image. Though not perfect, it does amazingly well. Because this is a publicly accessible tool, be aware that some of the images that other creators have generated may not be appropriate for students. Here are a few images I generated with the tool. When using Ideogram, consider finding an image that has the look you want and use its prompt, but tweak it to better fit how you want the design to look.

a bald eagle in front. American flag waving in the back. colors: red, white, and blue. Text: Go Eagles!text: "Science Ideas". beakers, microscope, laptop, cell phone, poster, 3d render, cinematichippopotamus with laptop, flat vector, isolated on a white background, text: Classroom Connect, poster, cinematic
AI-generated images by the author using Ideogram

Tip 3: Provide a Feedback Mechanism

Encourage your readers to provide feedback, ask questions, or suggest topics for future newsletters. If they are implementing an idea that you share or have a sample student product photo to share, provide a digital wall or board where they can be a part of the conversation to continue learning and sharing. Padlet works well as an easy tool that doesn’t require a learning curve for your teachers. If using Padlet, consider using the wall layout with sections, since you can set up several distinct columns to which your teachers can add their input accordingly, making it organized for you and all the readers to find things quickly.

Whether you share professional development tips and ideas on a weekly or monthly basis, you are sure to find that Canva can help make your communications much easier and view and read. If you already share a newsletter of such with your teachers, drop us a link to one of the editions and share with our readers. Also, if you find that you have a different tool to put together your newsletter, let us know the name of the tool you love and why it is your go-to newsletter tool.

Featured Image: Screenshot by Emily Horn of Newsletter Templates in Canva, https://www.canva.com/templates

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CanvaContent CreationEducational ResearchUncategorized

80 Graphic Organizer Templates for Active Learning

by Ernest Gonzales
written by Ernest Gonzales

If you are a reader like me, you can read a few pages of a book, pause for a second, and come to the realization that you can’t remember what you just read. Maybe you’re driving somewhere, and for a split second, you forget where you are driving. These types of experiences can happen easily because we are not actively thinking. The same thing happens to learners in our classrooms. In order to avoid these situations and seek deeper learning experiences for students that help them retain information, active learning instructional strategies can be utilized.

What Is Active Learning?

Active learning is a term used to refer to instructional strategies focused on getting learners to actively process new information such as through reflection, collaboration, writing, and more. Through active learning experiences, learners can retain more information than through passive learning experiences, such as note-taking. So it is important that educators implement active learning instructional strategies to improve learning outcomes. For those wanting to learn more about active learning, visit Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation.

Using Graphic Organizers for Active Learning (GOAL)

graphic organizer categories to promote active learning

One easy way to incorporate more active learning strategies is through the use of graphic organizers. In order to make it easier for educators to find and use these resources, I designed a series of 80 “GOALs” or “Graphic Organizers for Active Learning”. These GOALs are free, ready-to-use, and designed as dual-language resources. For districts such as ours in San Antonio, with 20% emergent bilinguals, it is crucial to have resources that are available in English and Spanish.  The graphic organizer templates are organized into different themes such as problem solving, collaboration, SEL, writing, and more to simplify the process of finding the exact template you need for lessons. The templates are designed with fun graphics and are meant to be engaging to your audiences.

The Graphic Organizer Templates

Here is a menu of eight categories of graphic organizers. Each category contains 10 different designs to choose from. The designs are created in Canva, an amazing design tool that is offering free services to K-12 schools. When you click on one of the designs, you’ll notice an option to use the template in Canva, meaning you can customize the template to fit exactly what you need, or you can use it as-is. Be sure to create a Canva account if you don’t already have one or talk to your district’s IT department about setting up access for your entire district.

Graphic Organizer Formats

When ready, you can print the graphic organizer for your students as a PDF file, or you can use these files with the ed tech tools of your choice. Since the GOALs are designed in Canva, you can download a PNG or a JPG file in order to place the graphic organizer into popular tools such as Kami, Lumio, Seesaw, or Canvas. For those educators ready to app smash these templates into ed tech tools, here is a guide with short video tutorials to help you get started.

exit ticket graphic organizers to promote active learning

As educators, the instructional strategies we implement should seek to make learning more effective. Active learning can do this for our students, but it helps to have the resources we need to get started. It’s an added bonus if the resources are free, too! Make active learning a “GOAL” in 2023 by downloading these templates today.

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Canva
Content CreationWeb 2.0 Tool

Upping Your Canva Game

by Lori Gracey
written by Lori Gracey

Canva is an online graphic design tool that is perfect for busy people. The Pro version is completely free to educators, which makes it even more perfect. You can use it to create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos, animated GIFs, Zoom backgrounds, book covers, and more. It’s great for making your lessons or newsletters more engaging, whether you are a pro with graphic design or a rank amateur like me. And it works on any browser or on the iOS or Android apps.

Here are a few tips to help you take full advantage of this fabulous tool.

Get to Know the Templates Available

Want to save a ton of time? Spend a few minutes becoming familiar with the types of templates that Canva offers. As an example, it has more than 3,400 templates for creating astonishingly beautiful charts and graphs (perfect for math and science) and 2,490 diagram templates (great for ELA and social studies). Are you hoping to create a fun meme to make your students laugh? 288 templates for that. Need a new background for your PowerPoint or Slides presentation to the PTA? 10,970 templates to choose from. Making a choice board for the students? 103 templates available. Trying to find just the right look for a “getting to know you” This or That activity for the faculty meeting? 35,240 templates. Just spend a little bit of time in the Canva search bar, and you’ll then be ready to rock the world, graphically speaking!

Canva

Change the Size of Your Designs Proportionally

This trick is a lifesaver, especially if you’ve ever grabbed a corner of a graphic and then ruined its proportions. Hold the ALT/OPTION key and drag your design elements out by either the side handles or the corner handles to scale them proportionally. Here are a few other keyboard shortcuts to know:

  • Change text to uppercase: Shift + CMD/CRTL + “K” key
  • Bold text: CMD/CRTL + “B” key
  • Duplicate elements: CMD/CRTL + “D” key
  • Group elements: CMD/CRTL + “G” key
  • Ungroup elements: Shift + CMD/CRTL + “G” key
  • And here are even more keyboard shortcuts.

Animate Elements of Your Design

You can easily animate elements on any design. After selecting the template, click on an element (or several elements) that you want to move. Then, find the Animate option on the middle top side of the workspace. There are 12 different ways the image/images can be animated.

Canva

Use Canva with Students

The Pro version allows you to share the Canva project goodness with your students. The teacher sets up a virtual classroom, invites students, and can them have them collaborate on a project. It can be used in the classroom or remotely, with the aid of a video chat tool as well. Comment additions from the students are helpful with @ options, allowing alerts to be sent to the teacher. This lets students enquire about their work as they go, so they can feel confident they’re going the right way. There’s even a free Canva for the Classroom online course to help you get started and a great secondary Canva Lesson Plan to introduce it to the students.

Get More Help to Fully Master Canva

TCEA has two ways to help you become a Canva ninja and amaze your friends and colleagues. One is to take the online, self-paced Canva Educator course. Self-paced means you work at your own speed when you have the time. And you have a full year to complete the course, although most educators finish it in a few days. It’s priced at just $39 and will cover not only the basics of the program but also design principles and how best to use it in teaching and learning.

The second way to get your Canva on is to attend the virtual Canva for Educators Conference to be held on Saturday, October 22 from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Presenters will be experienced Canva users in education, and they will share tons of resources, ideas, and tips with you. Attendees will have access to all of the sessions via recording through November 30. Early registration is just $59 and ends October 7, 2022. Register early, pay $79, and receive access to the full conference and the Canva Educator online course (normally $39). Both of these are bargains!

However you decide to ramp up your Canva skills, make sure that you are taking full advantage of this free-for-educators tool!

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Content AreasContent CreationWeb 2.0 Tool

10 Amazing Features of Canva for Education

by Jeni Long and Salleé Clark
written by Jeni Long and Salleé Clark

“Canva for Education’s goal is to inspire learning through the power of visual communication and collaboration. One of Canva’s core values is “Be a Force for Good” which is why Canva is investing in Education. Canva for Education is 100% free for K12 teachers and their students.”

Canva is our go-to creation platform. As educators, we create HyperDocs, presentations, infographics, announcements, newsletters, videos, and more in this amazing application. Canva for Education makes it easy for students and teachers to be designers. The tools are simple to use and their templates make eye-appealing designs come to life in minutes. Here are 10 reasons we use Canva for Education.

1. Brand Kit

In education, one aspect of design when communicating is a consistent theme– that includes fonts, colors, and graphics. Canva for education offers a Brand Kit to educators. Customize your creations with preset fonts and color schemes. This is great for creating content for parents, school staff, students, and the community.

2. Templates

In designing for the classroom it can take hours to create graphically engaging content like infographics, worksheets, presentations, and videos. Canva for education makes content creation easy with over 420,000 templates. Take a premade education template and add your own flair! Be sure to check out the classroom kit templates as well. Here you will find themed classroom décor, newsletters, lesson plan templates, and more.

3. Presentation Tools

Want to create recorded content for students to access at any time? Teachers can seamlessly present and record their Canva for education designs and share the recording through a downloaded video or link. In addition to present and record, teachers are able to bring excitement to their presentations with Canva magic shortcuts. While presenting, teachers can press the shift key and the question mark key to see a list of the commands available: Blur the screen, bring up a drumroll, shush the class, or even bring up a timer. These built-in presentation tools can make your transition time and engagement in lessons even greater.

4. Group Work

Another one of our favorite features of Canva for Education is Groupwork. There are a ton of Group Work templates to choose from where students can collaborate and edit content simultaneously. As an educator, you can edit the content to make it your own. Or you can share the link with your students and work together to sort, brainstorm, question, and learn in a digital, collaborative space.

5. SEL Templates

Social-Emotional Learning is vital in today’s classroom. Support the well-being of your students by staying connected with SEL templates from Canva for Education. Use these resources to create meaningful communication, activities, and connections.

6. Advanced Design Features

Many times as educators we have a project we want to do, however, to get the effect we want, we need to purchase an app or tool. For example, for Career Day teachers want to put pictures of students in their desired career choice. Being able to use tools like a background remover is required. Canva offers this feature and others that allow advanced digital creations to come to life. With the draw tool, color picker, QR code generator, the ability to apply colors to page features, Bitmoji integration, and more, advanced designs are possible and free.

7. App Smash

Canva also works well with many applications and has created templates to fit various platforms. Just a few of our favorite application templates included Flipgrid backgrounds, Google/Teams headers, Book Creator templates,  and OneNote embed.

8. Video Creation

Create videos with Canva for Education! There are video templates with various elements, text, and video layouts available. If there is a video project you have in mind, you CAN with Canva. Want students to create a tutorial recording their screen, create a TikTok Style video (but not on TikTok), or record themselves justifying a math problem? You can do all of this with Canva.

9. Organization

Keep all of your designs organized and easy to find with Folders. This is a nice way to stay organized, but you can also add any page from any of your designs to your new designs. For example, if you want to use the same transition or announcements slide each day, simply open folders in the design and select the slide you want, and it will add it to your new design instantly. You can also utilize the Classroom features in Canva and create groups and organize assignments for quick access for your students.

10. Canva Live

With Canva, you can have a running backchannel and emoji responses available for your students during your presentations. Students are able to join your Canva Live session on their mobile devices via a code. Through this feature, they can answer questions, ask questions, or leave comments that are only viewable by the educator. Want a quick formative assessment? Use the emoji feature for students to respond to questions. Be sure to check out Canva.live. 

Looking for more information regarding Canva for Education? Be sure to take a look at these resources! 

Join other educators, on October 22, in learning how to maximize Canva for teaching and learning! You’ll learn from Canva experts how to make the most of this amazing program. Teachers, administrators, and librarians will discover how to create and personalize lesson plans, posters, videos, and so much more. Register now!

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