Have you ever spent hours creating the perfect presentation structure, only to watch your students struggle with formatting rather than focusing on content? Canva templates offer a solution that can transform how your students demonstrate their learning while saving valuable classroom time. By providing pre-structured frameworks, you can help students showcase their understanding without getting bogged down in design decisions.
The Power of Templates in Education
There are several benefits of creating and sharing templates with students. In canva there are several template types you can use including presentations, posters, worksheets, whiteboards, infographics, flashcards, comic strips, graphic organizers, storyboards, story books, websites, videos, daily agendas, newsletters. Here are just a few of the ways that this method supports students:
- Structured guidance – Giving a template to a student helps them organize their thoughts and assignments logically helping to build confidence.
- Reduce cognitive load – Providing a template that already has an acceptable structure to follow means that students can focus their attention on the content instead of having the added expectation of being skilled at design and layout which is most likely not one of the standards they are expected to learn in your content area.
- Saves time – Though it does save time for the student by removing additional tasks to demonstrate mastery, it also saves you time when it comes to grading and peer reviews.
- Promotes differentiation – Once you have one template done, you can easily tweak it to make another template (or two) to better differentiate for your students providing a variety of supports that some students may need more than others.
- Accommodates accessibility needs – Templates can include proper headings and hierarchies for screen readers, include pre-set color combinations for better contrast, and include built-in alt text prompts for images.
Finding and Using Canva Templates
That is great but where can you find templates in Canva that are already made and ready to tweak, share, and use in your classroom? There are several locations you can find templates for Canva depending on what type of template you are working on. Here are three locations you might find most helpful:
- Education Presentations – Tons of education-themed presentations allow you to jump start your creative process and get to the content faster!
- Student Portfolios – Tweak one of these portfolios and share with your students (or select a few from them to choose from) so they can start documenting their work and progress. Click on the sidebar filter to narrow down the style, color, grade level, and more.
- School Posters – Create posters to instruct, inform and inspire by tweaking these great resources. Lots to choose from!
Implementing Canva Templates
Begin by creating a Canva for Education account using your school email address. This license allows you all the benefits of Canva Pro but for free…plus you can invite your students to your class and have them make use of Canva through your account. Next locate the template you want to use (or create one from scratch). Now all you have to do is:
- Click on the Share button (top right corner)
- Click on the Template Link icon
- Click the Create Template Link
- Copy the template link and share as needed with your students
You can delete the link at any time which prevents users from accessing the file – similar to changing the share settings of a Google Doc. Below you can see the icon for the template link in Canva – the image on the left indicates the file is not shared while the image on the right indicates that the file has been shared as a template and a URL generated for others to access.
Subject-Specific Applications
If you have not used templates before, you may be wondering how you would use them in your content area. Here are just a few of the ways that you can make use of templates with your students.
| Science Infographics: Use an infographic template for students to visually summarize the parts of a cell or the life cycle of a butterfly. Posters: Have students create safety posters using Canva’s poster templates to display proper lab safety protocols. Videos: Encourage students to record and edit video summaries of their experiments using video templates. |
Social Studies Presentations: Provide a base template for a presentation on key events of westward expansion or another historical topic. Students personalize it with relevant text and images. Comic Strips: Assign students to create a comic strip that tells the story of a significant historical event or figure. Storyboards: Have students plan and organize a digital museum exhibit on a historical era using a storyboard template. |
English Language Arts Portfolios: Share portfolio templates for students to document their essays, poems, and projects throughout the year. Graphic Organizers: Provide templates for brainstorming story ideas, character development, or analyzing themes in literature. Flashcards: Assign students to create flashcards to learn and review vocabulary words or literary devices. |
| Mathematics Worksheets: Share editable worksheets for solving equations, graphing functions, or practicing word problems. Infographics: Assign students to create infographics explaining a mathematical concept, such as the Pythagorean theorem or data trends in statistics. Whiteboards: Collaborate on solving problems in real-time using Canva’s whiteboard templates. |
Physical Education Posters: Students create motivational posters for a healthy lifestyle or exercise routine. Worksheets: Share templates for tracking fitness goals or recording data during fitness tests. Daily Agendas: Use agenda templates to plan and share weekly fitness challenges or activities. |
Foreign Languages Flashcards: Students create flashcards for vocabulary practice with visual aids and translations. Comic Strips: Let students practice writing in the target language by creating short comics. Newsletters: Have students create newsletters in the foreign language covering cultural events or topics. |
Best Practices and Tips
Here are a few tips to consider when creating/sharing templates with students in order to make it the best experience for your students (and for you):
- Include clear instructions within the template. Since you cannot have text off to the side of the work area, consider adding a page at the beginning that includes instructions, a rubric, and/or any other information that students may need.
- Add placeholders showing expected content type. This may be a scaffolding opportunity in which you provide these placeholders the first few times your students use templates and then you taper off and allow them to add placeholders as they see fit.
- Consider file size as some students may have limited internet. If students are working on these on their phone or at home, having lots of graphics or elements in the template may increase the file size making it more cumbersome for some students to efficiently access and use.
The strategic use of Canva templates can revolutionize how students demonstrate their learning while building essential digital literacy skills. Start small, perhaps with a single unit or project, and expand your template use as you and your students become more comfortable with the process.
Remember: The goal isn’t to restrict creativity but to provide a foundation that allows students to focus on content mastery while developing their design skills at an appropriate pace.
What’s your first step going to be in implementing templates in your classroom?