I came across a wonderful online tool courtesy of Richard Byrne’s amazing Free Technology of Teachers blog. If you have not looked at blog before I suggest doing so now before you read another word!!

The resource I learned about  is called Canva which is an extremely user-friendly design site that allows users to drag and drop design elements to enable the creation of high-quality presentions. You can upload your own images to use in your graphics or choose to use the mix of free and fee-based images and templates Your completed Canva projects can be downloaded as PDF and PNG files. You can also simply link to your online graphic

Here is one I made for my neighborhood CD circle using free templates – CD Circle 2015 Flyer.

This could be a great presentation tool for teachers to introduce to their students in addition to being a tool to base a design project. A framework for teachers to follow is now available on the new Canva for Education site. As a recent post on Free Technology of Teachers highlights, the  Canva for Education site features eighteen lesson plans written by Vicki Davis, Steven Anderson, Terri Eichholz, and Paul Hamilton. The lesson plans include things like Paul’s making historical infographics in which students summarize and visually represent the connections between historical events and their causes. For the elementary school crowd Terri has a lesson called Initial Selfies in which students learn to isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds. One of Steven’s lesson plans calls for students to build graphics about percentages. And to take advantage of students’ familiarity with Facebook, Vicki has built a lesson plan in which students build historical figure fan pages.

If you want to get your creative juices flowing Canva might be a good place to start.