Last week I attended the ISTE Live conference in Philadelphia courtesy of canvas. During the week I shared some of my notes during the conference on FreeTech4Teachers.com. one of those notes It was about the impressive use of Canva by Lauren Enders, who uses it as a CAA tool.
Watching Lauren’s presentation and demos from some of the people at the Canva booth (teaching and non-teaching alike) inspired me to do some research on slide design in the context of education. I am familiar with the orientation that people like Garr Reynolds and nancy duarte give for making the presentations look good for an adult audience. What I was interested in was finding out if making a compelling presentation makes a difference in a classroom environment.
It turns out that making attractive slides makes all the difference for students. TO study 2021 (link opens a PDF) by LeFebvre, et. Alabama. observed the difference in the way students process and receive information from teleprompter-style slides (text with no images) and presentation slides (images with minimal text). The findings suggest that students process information more actively and analytically when viewing presentation slides compared to teleprompter slides.
If you want to make better presentation slides as suggested by the results of the aforementioned study, here are five canvas features that can help you and your students achieve this.
animate a route
Canva has a ton of standard options for animating objects in your presentations. These include typical “enter”, “exit”, and “turn” animations. There is also an option to design your own animation path for an object to follow. You can use that option to do things like make a plane fly in loops on your slide. watch this demo to see how to animate a path on a Canva slide.
Liven up your handwriting
Earlier this year, Canva added a freehand drawing tool. This demo video shows you how to use that tool. You can use the freehand drawing tool in conjunction with the path animation tool to animate your handwriting.
video background remover
You can add a little talking head video to any of your Canva presentation slides. Just upload a video recording of yourself and then insert it into your slide. If you want only your talking head to appear and none of the stuff to appear in the background of your video, use Canva’s video background remover. It only takes one click to remove background from your video. This video that I recorded last fall shows how the video background remover works.
AI Imaging
If you’ve ever spent time scrolling through images looking for the perfect one for your presentation only to settle for “good enough,” you should give Canva’s text to image app a try. The text to image tool allows you to write a description of the image you need and several options will be created for you. Choose the one you like best for your presentation. watch this demo to see how Canva’s text to image tool works.
Maps and slides within slides
You can add just about anything in a Canva slideshow. That includes how Google Maps works, websites, videos, and even slideshows made with other tools like Google Slides. The best part is that students viewing your Canva slides online can interact with any of the elements you add to your slideshow. A demo of using Google Maps can be seen within the Canva slides. seen here.
Add alt text to your slides
Okay, so this might not be a “cool” feature and it makes this list six items long, but it’s an important accessibility feature to be aware of. By right-clicking on any image on your Canva slides, you can add alt text to improve the accessibility of your slides for those using screen readers.
Self-paced courses you can start today
I have three self-paced courses that you can start today and finish at your own pace.
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