Canva now free to schools, integrates with Google Education

It’s been hard not to notice the growth of Canva, the Australian online design startup now attracts some 20 million users to its service every month, downloading and modifying templates to polish up their communications.

They’re about to get more visible still, as the business on the back of strong adoption in schools everywhere, is now making its service available to schools for free. Canva is also integrating with Google for Education’s ubiquitous suite of learning tools.

The initiative was officially launched at the massive BETT education show in London last week. The education facing product from Canva has seen some changes to make it more school appropriate, many of the suggestions have been generated by teachers who have been longtime users of the product.

Interest has been strong all over the world with innovative educators seeing the benefit of introducing students to visual language and its role in fostering a creative approach to their work. There’s also a strong component of collaboration to the product, a good working habit that will be carried through into future careers.

“Teachers are constantly creating content and have a constant need for fresh and engaging approaches and students do as well.

“We’re really keen for students to build digital and visual literacy skills, we see those as critical for the future for kids and we feel Canva is the way they can do that,” says Canva Director of Product Georgia Vidler.

“It's about building design skills, our world is image saturated and students really need the ability to be able to present their ideas visually to garner attention, to pitch a business. We have a school that we’re collaborating with in the US at the moment who are using Canva to do their final year projects where the kids have to create a business and pitch it to the teacher, forming critical entrepreneurial skills.

“We’ve been working with a bunch of teachers to work out what will be the next generation of features that can add value to the product. We have a huge community of teachers already, out of the 20 million monthly users we have around 20 per cent who identify as teachers or students,” Vidler says.

Canva for education is COPPA and FERPA compliant and it gives users access to millions of fonts, images, templates and video.

There is an all new collaboration space for classroom projects and the version progress feature lets users track what they have done and experiment and modify their work.

“It’s a classroom space that teachers own, they can invite students into the class and then students can share designs with the teacher and the rest of the class to get feedback and marks,” says Vidler.

Other add-ons to the platform like YouTube, Giphy, Emojis, Bitmojis and Typeform suit the modern classroom.

Canva’s integration with Google for Education includes Google Sign In, Google Classroom Rostering and Sharing, Google Drive and Google Maps.

“It's really funny to be an Australian start up working alongside Google for Education, it kicked off quite organically, we’ve been working with them for the last six months or so to construct a partnership and we’ve put together a suite of integrations between Google for Education and Canva,” says Vidler.

Many teachers use Google Classroom so they can share Canva content using the platform. It's now also integrated with Google Drive and Google Maps which makes using the two products together a seamless experience.

Teachers are encouraged to get started and register their free Canva for Education account: https://www.canva.com/education/