Class this week provided me with a lesson that I definitely needed to learn: graphic creation. I’ve used some different graphic creation apps in school, such as Canva, but never in the ways that I have been recently.

Canva

This post will mainly be talking about Canva and its lovely features; however, I would still love to show some other useful Graphic creation tools.

Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark offers a range of tools for creating and sharing visual content,  including social media graphics, animated videos, and web pages. Ste graphic design section of Adobe Spark allows users to create nice graphics. In addition to graphic design, Adobe Spark offers a web page design tool that enables users to create creative, responsive web pages without any coding knowledge. There are plenty of templates to use, similar to Canva, in which you can select “brochure, invitations, and birthday cards.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a presentation application that allows students and teachers to create meaningful slideshows. There are plenty of open templates that you can use based on your taste and color palette. Teachers are able to incorporate quizzes, polls, photos, and videos to ensure maximum student engagement during class.  The versatility and adaptability of PowerPoint make it an essential component of modern education, helping educators deliver content effectively and interactively.

Canva!

Canva provides you with a selection of templates for plenty of different topics, and you can choose to customize these templates as you go, to fit your lesson and your standards. You can use it on a computer, tablet or phone, although it definitely lends itself better to a larger screen environment such as those found on tablets or computers. Canva also provides the option to have either a free account or a pro account which costs 17 dollars a month.

An amazing discovery that I recently made about Canva was its education platform! Canva for Education is free for registered teachers and allows teachers to share Canva with their students. My teacher for another class actually showed us that this was an option, so thank you to him. Through the shared Canva, students can create work individually or collaboratively, and it provides a creative way for them to make a variety of posters, presentations, and more. Teachers can also use it to create worksheets, class posters, class decorations, presentations, and pretty much anything you could put your mind to.

Here is a lesson plan that I made up for my gym class:

It was exciting to experiment with different layouts and see how small changes can make a big difference to templates. I’m starting to see how graphic design connects to communication and storytelling more, not just decoration. In the future, I would like to learn how to create things on the Canva app without templates and simply do it on my own. Since this blog includes weekly reflections and inquiry posts, I learned much about how to use design to express the tone of each week, whether it’s calm, bright, or professional. Canva made the design process easy to understand and fun to experiment with, and I feel more confident adding creative visuals to my blog posts now.

Just to let all you readers know, by the way, I am no technology genius, nor have I had any intricate teachings on graphic design; this means that you truly don’t need the experience to use Canva, Adobe Spark, or PowerPoint!

How I will use Graphic Design Tools in the future:

I would like to provide my students with lots of hands-on assignments that allow students to have more autonomy and the ability to create using their imagination. Canva, along with many other graphic design tools can be used in every subject in school as well.

For history, students could create timelines, maps, or “travel brochures” for historical locations. Language arts could be as simple as creating character posters, storyboards, or book reports. Making math charts, graphs, or visual word problems would be a fun activity, as well as making the opening scene to a play.

My classroom will be covered in fun, colorful graphics as well to excite my students and have them engaged. For my first In-Situ, teaching mathematics in a third-grade class, I actually regretted not using Canva to create an engaging and creative exit ticket, so I ended up going on Canva to create one after the class was over. There were so many sample exit tickets, so it was really easy to find one I enjoyed! This was the final result:

Final Thoughts

Overall, this week’s exploration of graphic design has opened my eyes to how creativity and education can work hand in hand. I’ve learned that tools like Canva, Adobe Spark, and even PowerPoint aren’t just for making things look nice; they’re powerful tools for enhancing learning, communication, and student engagement. Visual design allows students to express themselves in new ways, create meaningful graphics, and make projects, while allowing teachers present information more clearly and creatively. I’m excited to continue exploring these tools and to bring more visual storytelling into my future classroom. Graphic design has definitely become one of my favorite discoveries so far in this journey!