Canva

Affordances

Canva is a highly professional designer website that allows teachers to produce and create anything from educational presentations, videos, and infographics for free at a premium level. This tool allows one to create your own designs or to use one of the many templates that are tailored to specific categories. The graphics, fonts, and images are all very visually pleasing and diverse, which is an important factor when bringing something into the classroom. Colorful presentations engage students more with the context, rather than simple and boring worksheets. Canva is also great for collaborating with peers or creating school projects. For example, already in my experience, I have utilized Canva on many MAET projects, which have allowed for research information to be presented in many different and engaging ways.

Constraints

While creating and looking into Canva a few issues arose. Some of these constraints were present in the video creation portion of the site. Compared to tools like iMovie, which allow for editing of videos, Canva was slower and tended to lag. The capacity for easy and smooth film editing was perhaps harder with this tool because of the website format. The number of options that are available can be overwhelming and cause students to spend more time picking themes or templates rather than working on their required work. Kids could easily get distracted by certain template categories, like memes, that students would like and look through instead. Though it is a great tool to bring technology into the class, it is an expansive site that might take younger, elementary-aged students some time to figure out and be able to use effectively.