It’s no secret that I love Canva. It’s one of my favorite tools and helps me promote tech tools, share ideas, and highlight instructional strategies with teachers in my building and across my PLC. So when they announce new updates, it’s a big deal! Let’s take a look at the new features and get ready for LOTS of AI (artificial intelligence):
Magic Write was just recently introduced and just like ChatGPT will generate original content from scratch based on your specific instructions. But now they’ve enhanced it allowing it to generate content based on existing text. You can also expand, summarize or rewrite the text, as well as, add autofill capabilities, where new text will be generated to complete a semi-finished design. I can see this being very powerful when it comes to brainstorming and editing first drafts, checking for issues, and how they can be fixed.
Did you know you can also outline in Docs and then automatically convert those ideas into a presentation? From a teacher standpoint, I can see this being beneficial when students produce final products allowing for more work time on content and taking away some of the extra time to design. Instead, students can tweak the design that has been created, rather than searching for the perfect picture or font.
Translate will instantly convert the text in your designs to over 100 different languages. Coming from a school with a large ESOL population with several different languages, this will be very helpful to push out flyers, reminders, and more!
Although Text to Image was introduced last year, they’ve also made updates here. Simply describe the image you are looking for and watch it appear! Need to tweak it? Just edit your original search and see what develops.
You can also now import files from other programs such as Word or PhotoShop and edit directly in Canva.
With photos, you can use either Magic Edit to add or replace elements in a photo, such as changing out the type of flowers in the foreground or use Magic Eraser to simply remove elements from your design.
The photo editor also now detects the foreground and background of your photos, allowing you to edit these independently of each other. Just select the area you want and change the vibrance, saturation, or brightness.
The Draw tool will allow you to scribble, sketch freehand, create outlines, underline, or annotate. It also has shape assist, where you draw a shape such as a circle and it transforms it into a perfectly polished one! You will also have the option to select from other elements to match what you were trying to illustrate!
If you get stuck on a design, uploaded an image and Magic Design will create templates, fonts, graphics, and more based on the image and turns it into the perfect design.
Or use Magic Presentation, where you can describe your idea in a few words or based on a topic and a presentation will be suggested with suitable content and design layouts.
Some other new design features which I love to use in Google or Adobe and have been wishing for the longest time are:
- Grids where you can use preset guides or make your own to help line up or measure between elements
- Layers that will allow you to view, manage, or arrange elements on separate layers and choose which ones to lock, which can really come in handy for drag-and-drop activities. Just think of the possibilities when you can lock a background layer and the foreground layer’s elements can move around!
- Gradients!!! There can be applied to a background or a shape! I’ve been waiting for this one for so long!
- More fonts – Honestly, I haven’t been worried about this one as there are a lot of fonts to choose from. But if you like lots of fonts, Canva has partnered with Monotype so there are now 1,000 more curated fonts available.
They also mentioned the Template assistant that can highlight possible issues in your template and give you suggestions for how to correct them. I’m not sure if it falls into the Magic Presentation tool or not and can’t find more about it, so I’ll keep you updated.
In videos, you can now Create Animation by simply recording the path of an element while dragging it on the screen. You can do this with graphics, stickers, photos, frames, and other videos. To make things even more professional sounding within your videos, use Beat Sync to automatically match your video footage to your soundtrack. However, if you want more control, you can still move clips around and make manual adjustments.
Finally, there’s the new Brand Hub, one central place to make, manage and market your creative brand. This is where you can store core elements such as colors and fonts, and set up multiple brand kits. So if you have different social media accounts, such as a professional teacher account and a class account, you can have different brand colors and fonts. For your class brand, everyone in the class can access it to add to projects! The same goes for school social media campaigns, if you need to have several people access the brand guidelines and logos.
I’m excited about all the new updates and a little overwhelmed thinking about how quickly AI has taken over the world. However, the one thing I wish Canva would have updated is the Quick Create Collection which creates designs for multiple social media accounts at the same time. It’s still a bit clunky and I’m tired of receiving the same templates over and over. I do wish I could play with these a bit more and add my own flair. Still, I’m eager to try some of these new updates out and see how it changes the way I design in the future including how I run our school social media accounts, as well as, my own.
What are your favorite updates and how do you see these changing the way you use Canva in the classroom?
Ms Priester EDU 
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