Canva for Education — All You Need to Know

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In this guide to ‘Canva for Education’, you’ll find all the key information you’ll learn all about the benefits of using this popular graphic design tool in your classroom, what the eligibility criteria are, and how to get started with the tool.

What is Canva for Education?

Canva for Education is the classroom version of Canva’s easy-to-use web-based graphic design tool.

Like the main version of Canva, the classroom version can be used to create presentations, slides, posters, simple videos, drawings, art and a wide range of other visual assets — and it includes a large number of customizable templates for classroom settings.

Teachers can use the design tools and thousands of educational templates in the tool to easily design visually attractive lesson plans, class resources and classroom decorations.

Additionally, Canva for Education integrates seamlessly with popular ‘learning management systems’ (LMS) like Schoology, Blackboard, Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams.

Teachers can add Canva-based assignments to their students from within their LMS, and students can complete work and receive feedback on Canva tasks — all without leaving their regular LMS learning environment.

Canva for Education’s enormous library of over 93,000 customizable education templates can be incorporated into classroom learning activities by both teachers and students alike.

These educational templates include:

At time of writing, Canva for Education is used by more than 50 million students and teachers in over 600,000 schools.

Who is eligible to use Canva for Education?

While Canva for Education is available in 190 countries around the world and can be used in over 130 different languages, Canva applies strict eligibility criteria to the teachers, students and educational organisations that can actually use it.

At the moment, the tool is available to certified education workers who are ‘currently active’ in primary or secondary schools. This generally means teachers in accredited schools from kindergarten to year 12 (K-12).

The full list of eligibility criteria is:

Canva for Education is not available to uncertified homeschool educators, online tutors, third-level institutions, university students, adult education institutions or non-profit organizations amongst others.

(There is a specific Canva plan available for non-profits which is also free — you can find out more about this here. There is also a special Canva plan available for third-level institutions called ‘Canva for Campus’; this requires a paid plan for university staff, who can then give students free access to Canva through their paid staff accounts.)

As for student access to Canva for Education, this is provided through invitation from the teacher’s Canva account. School students cannot sign up for an educational account directly with Canva themselves.

Student invitations are managed from within a teacher’s account settings — these allow teachers to invite students to use Canva via embeddable links, Google Classroom imports or email invitations.

It is important for Canva for Education teachers to know that parental consent is required before inviting a student below 13 years of age to use the platform.

How do I sign up to Canva for Education?

Getting access to Canva for Education involves a short application process. You go to the Canva for Education signup page, where you will be asked for your name and school email address.

Assuming you are a teacher, you then select ‘teacher’, and then click ‘Get verified’.

(If Canva recognises your school through your email address you may get access to the platform immediately.)

Most applicants have to upload a photo or scanned official documentation to show Canva that they are currently ‘active’ as a primary or secondary teacher.

The following documents are accepted for verification purposes:

Once your application has been submitted, your application will be reviewed by the Canva for Education team within seven days. When your teaching status has been verified, you will receive an email with an access link to your Canva for Education account.

You can learn more about signing up to Canva for Education as a teacher in the video below.

Is Canva for Education free?

Yes — Canva for Education is entirely free for eligible applicants (including their students).

Eligible applicants, as discussed above, are certified education workers who are ‘currently active’ in primary or secondary schools.

If you don’t meet the eligibility criteria, you can always experiment with the normal version of Canva by signing up for a ‘Canva Free’ account. This cut-down version of the tool includes a generous set of 250,000+ design templates, 1+ million stock assets, and it comes with 5GB of cloud storage for your designs.

However, in order to avail of the full suite of Canva tools, you would be better off investing in a ‘Canva Pro’ account.

This is the fully-fledged version of Canva, which — for $15 a month — gives you 3.8+ million templates, 127+ million stock assets, as well as all of Canva’s editing features (background removal, magic resize tool, customized exports), brand design tools and 1TB of cloud storage.

You can find out more about the differences between the free Canva plan and Canva Pro in our full Canva Pro vs Free comparison.

What’s the difference between Canva for Education and Canva Pro?

In terms of design templates, editing features and stock imagery assets, Canva for Education and Canva Pro are identical in every way. And just to be clear, this means that on a Canva Pro account, you can access all of the education-based templates in the Canva template library.

The key differences between Canva for Education and Canva Pro are:

The table below highlights the full set of differences between the two versions of the tool.

Can designs created in Canva for Education be used for commercial purposes?

Regular users of Canva’s paid-for services — Canva Pro and Canva for Teams — can use Canva designs for certain commercial purposes such as book covers, online publications and print posters. (A full list of permitted commercial uses is available here)

However, this is not the case with Canva for Education. All designs created with it can be used for educational purposes only.

Canva’s license agreement states:

What is Canva’s ‘Education Creators’ program?

Canva’s ‘Education Creators’ program is a recent initiative that encourages (and pays!) teachers who create customizable educational templates on Canva.

When a participating teacher submits a template to the scheme, it undergoes a review by the Canva team; and if it passes, it gets added to Canva’s template library.

Participating Canva for Education teachers receive monthly royalty payments for their education templates based on the number of Pro templates they create, and how often these Canva templates are used by the wider Canva userbase.

This scheme — which is part of the broader ‘Canva Creators’ program — is currently in BETA, and can only be joined if your application is accepted by Canva’s onbording team.

You can submit your application to be a Canva Education Creator here.

Where can I get help with Canva for Education?

In addition to the full set of standard Canva help materials in the Canva help center, Canva provides specific resources to help teachers and students use the educational version of the tool.

These include a set of 21 excellent tutorial videos in the ‘Teach with Canva’ course on how to use Canva for Education to create engaging classroom activities such as student brainstorming sessions, student presentations and building class relationships.

Canva also provides some very useful resources for teachers such as the ‘Back to School Toolkit’ and a range of subject-based teacher ‘playbooks’.

These interactive documents include handy shortcut links to educational materials in Canva.

Additionally, these resources provide teachers with various codes that can be entered into the Canva asset library — these codes call up educational graphics such as ‘rewards and affirmation’ stickers, ‘classroom avatars’ and ‘virtual classroom’ graphics and imagery.

Other education resources available with ‘Canva for Education’ include a lesson planning tool, as well as a library of ready-to teach K-12 lessons across English, Math, Science, Art, Design and Social Studies.

For support and advice from other teaching professional, educators can also make use of the official ‘Canva Teachers Community’ group on Facebook.

Finally, if you need general technical support with the platform, you can contact Canva via email — education queries are usually answered within 48 hours.

Where can I learn more about Canva?

We have lots of other Style Factory resources about Canva available to help you learn more about the platform: