Tag: Canva

⭐ My favorite of Canva’s new presentation transitions is Match and Move.

This one recognizes images or text across two different slides no matter the size, location, or color and animates any identical elements smoothly between pages.  Let’s say I place my bitmoji on the left side of the screen and then I duplicate the slide and put it on the right side of this new slide. Now, if I add a match & move transition between those two slides, Bitmoji Jake will move smoothly across the slide! And I can modify how quickly that movement takes place, going from a one-tenth of a second super fast movement to a 2.5 second, slower movement!

And this doesn’t just work with Bitmoji…

I can do it with other images and text as well! I can even make the images bigger, smaller, rotated, or even a different color and it’ll animate it smoothly for me!!

🎥 This is huge for stop-motion animations. And if I want a nonlinear movement, I can just make multiple slides that each are a part of that movement! This is so exciting. Very cool for presentations, but also ridiculously cool for stop-motion animations.

🎤 Plus, we can then record our slides with a voiceover by clicking Present > and then selecting present and record. So now we can create narrated stop-motion animations!!

Speaking of Videos, Match & Move also works in Canva Videos, so you can do it there, too!

And, check this out, we’ll soon be able to edit our presentations as videos! This will let us modify the timing of individual slides and add and sync audio tracks to our slides.

[News Source: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/unveiling-the-canva-visual-worksuite/ ]

Continue reading Stop Motion Animations with Match & Move in Canva Presentations

Canva Presentations came out about a year ago, and they continue to make improvements to it. 

They’ve added a bunch of new transitions between slides, including Match and Move, which I’ll cover in detail in a moment.

At this time, Canva Presentations have 8 different transitions: dissolve, slide, circle wipe, color wipe, line wipe, match & move, stack, and chop. Each of them can be customized so that you can choose how quickly you’d like the transition to happen or what direction you’d like it to happen in. For a color wipe, you can also choose what colors you’d like to use for the transition.

“Next Slide! Oh, sorry. lol” Canva has also added Remote Control, letting multiple presenters connect to a virtual clicker from any device to navigate and manage slides, remotely or in person. So, if you’re in a room together, both presenters can click forward a slide. Or, if you want to use multiple devices, maybe one at the front of your classroom to project, and then one at the back of the classroom to control the pace, you can do that too. And, better yet, if you’re co-presenting remotely, it no longer matters who is sharing their screen. So, if you’re not the screen sharer, you can still click the next slide button. And, you even have access to triggering their special slide effects, like the drumroll and the stage curtain.

This feature works on phones as well – so you can present from your computer but control from your phone while you’re moving around a room or a stage!

This feature is available in all Canva accounts.

[Image Source: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/unveiling-the-canva-visual-worksuite/ ]

Continue reading New Transitions and Remote Control in Canva Presentations

Wait, more Canva stuff? That’s right – they’ve upgraded their Video tool too!

It already lets you upload video clips, but you can now drag and drop them on a timeline and perform basic editing tasks with them as well. These basic tasks include trimming clips, splitting clips, and resizing them! It also already lets you access a ton of templates, add text elements, add slick transitions, insert some of Canva’s familiar graphic elements, kick your videos up a notch with music, audio tracks, and sound effects. You can add your own voiceovers or narration, and, there’s more.

This first one is a big one….They’re now letting us remove backgrounds from videos!!!

This is a Pro feature but, once again, it is free on education accounts. In my testing, there doesn’t seem to be a limit to how long of a video it can remove backgrounds from either. I did it on videos that are 18 seconds long and 54 seconds long. Obviously, the longer the video, the longer it’ll take. The only downside with this tool is you can’t modify how it removes the background. And, since it’s done by AI, the removal isn’t always perfect. Did it take out something it shouldn’t have? Did it leave in something it should’ve taken out? Nothing you can do about it. But, seriously, that’s like complaining about free pizza because it doesn’t have banana peppers on it.

This is an awesome, awesome feature and I’m excited to play with it more, even if I’d like to add some banana peppers along with the sausage and pepperoni.

And, another new feature: they’ve added new animation tools that let us adjust the type, speed, style, or direction of video animations! 

Again, all of these features are available on the free education accounts!

And guess what – I’ve got at least 2 more Canva updates that I’m going to save for the next blog post! Make sure you’re subscribed, following, getting notified, and all of that so that you don’t miss it.

[Image Source: https://chromeunboxed.com/canva-outpaces-google-microsoft-visual-worksuite#:~:text=Launch%20Canva%20Whiteboard-,More%20tools,-Canva%20Video%20has ]

Continue reading Background Removal and more, in Canva Video!

I recently shared a boatload of Canva updates, but it was too much to fit into one post, so I’ve got a few more to share today! 

When I saw this first one, I said wait, there’s a PDF Editor in Canva too!? I stumbled upon this one and I’m super excited about it. You can import your PDFs into Canva and edit them for free! It even breaks the uploaded PDF into editable elements! Want to customize some things or delete elements? You can! Wow.

Just go to the upload option in the top right and upload a PDF.  Then, head to your projects and click on the PDF to open it and mess around with it!

You can easily change, add, or delete text. You can add images, lines, shapes, and other content. You can even use the built-in Draw app–which is in beta–to add a signature! It was tough with my trackpad, but on a touchscreen, it’d be much easier. What a great idea. You can use add, remove and reorder pages, so that means you can merge or split PDFs.  They listed some other features that I haven’t found yet, like the ability to rotate pages. I’m sure it’s there somewhere.

And don’t forget: you can collaborate on these too!

When you’re all done, you can share these right on the Canva site, turn them into presentations or websites, or download them as images or PDFs. And, if you share them on Canva, you can even check the viewing statistics!

Like all of these Canva features, they’re free with some limitations.

However, for us educators, there are very few limitations because education accounts are FREE!  With PDFs, the maximum file size is 15 MB, and the maximum number of pages in an import is 15 pages.  There are some other things that they don’t have support for yet including ”soft masks, shading, tiled patterns, JPEG 2000 or JBIG images, and color filters.”  I don’t really know what those things are – lol – so I guess it’s no big deal for me!

I will say, though, it’s not a perfect tool. As you can see, we still get those weird OCR-text things that we see in other apps, like text that rotates between capital and lowercase letters… and sometimes it can’t even read a font at all. So, it’s got a ways to go, but remember: it’s all editable, so if the errors are minimal, you can fix them right inside Canva.

[Image Source: https://www.canva.com/pdf-editor ]

Continue reading The Canva PDF Editor

The Canva Visual Worksuite has added the ability to build one-page websites, no coding required.

Unlike Docs, this is not in beta – it’s ready to go now!!

As we’re used to with Canva, they have a ton of responsive templates all ready for us to customize. Also as expected, it uses their familiar drag-and-drop setup, and gives you access to tons of content. Like most contemporary site-builders, Canva Sites are automatically optimized for desktop, mobile, or tablets.

Once you’re ready to put your site out there, you can make a custom URL that ends with my.canva.site.

Another option is to use Canva to purchase a domain or, finally, connect it to your own existing domain.  You can also set them up to have password protection, which is nice for educators and students!  Once the site is out there, you can also track traffic and engagement like how many visitors the site has had. This is part of the Pro version, but it’s free on Canva Edu.

And, again, collaboration, commenting, and possibility of using it within Canva Teams. You can also take any document, presentation, PDF, etc. and turn it into a responsive website through this.

Canva Websites is free to all, though some features are not free.

However, Canva Edu accounts have access to just about all of it – aside from things like buying domains – for free. I should point out, it appears that users on free accounts are limited to 5 sites published on their Canva domain. Again, though, this won’t affect you on an edu account.

So, believe it or not there’s actually MORE news from Canva, but I’m going to hold onto it until future blog posts. Be sure to check back in for more Canva updates and additions. Up next, some news from Book Creator….

[Image Source: https://www.canva.com/website-builder/]

Continue reading One-page Canva websites

Canva Docs is currently in beta and you can sign up to join the waitlist at canva.com/docs!

Their site says that it will be “a visual-first document creator that allows you to design documents supercharged with videos, images, graphics, charts, and graphs.” If you’re happy with more stripped down docs, than you’re probably going to be satisfied with Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Honestly, they almost certainly have more of the functional tools that we expect from Docs. But if you need your docs to be be visually appealing, than you’re going to want to check this out. And, guess what: your students probably prefer eye-catching docs, so you may want THEM to use Canva Docs instead! 

The site reports that Canva Docs will have a drag-and-drop editor for adding and editing visual content, hassle-free data visualization tools for adding checklists, tables, graphs, and charts, and Canva’s extensive content library of videos, images, graphics, and more.

For that content library, you can just type a backslash and it’ll show you the options. You can collaborate, you can comment, and you can work on any kind of device.

For the most part, that’s not all that different from Google Docs or Microsoft Word. But they’re thinking out of the box here, too.

Check this out: You can share your docs online and viewers can interact with it like a website. You can track audience interactions, such as who has viewed your Docs and when. And, you can easily turn your Doc into a Canva presentation, using their “Docs to Decks” feature! You can even create and embed other Canva designs like whiteboards and other visuals.

It does look, however, like Canva Edu users will be capped at 100GB storage for all of their designs. That should be plenty, but it’s worth keeping an eye on this to see how big these eye-catching documents are.

[Image Source: https://www.canva.com/docs/ ]

Continue reading Canva Docs

Canva has been moving and shaking lately! I’ve recently shared about updates to Canva video, the addition of Canva whiteboards, Canva presentation enhancements, and some Canva courses for students. But they went and topped all of that with the Visual Worksuite!

The tool that used to be a novelty for creating visuals and print media can now do darn near everything. Their Visual Workspace now includes Docs, Whiteboards, Presentations, Social, Video, Print, and Websites!

Their site calls it “the perfect end-to-end solution for businesses, nonprofits, educators, content creators, and anyone who wants to make an impact with visual communication.” And I think they’re right!

These tools all use Canva’s familiar drag and drop editing, so once you’re used to it in one spot, you’ll just apply it in another spot. And, best of all, they’re all collaborative and work with the recent addition of Canva for Teams, meaning you can identify a certain set of collaborators that you work with as a team and have a collection of brand materials, like your school colors, that everyone can access.

The most exciting ones here, in my opinion, are Docs and Websites.

[Video Source: https://www.canva.com/worksuite/ ]

Continue reading The Canva Visual Worksuite

In the top menu in Canva you’ll notice a new option: Whiteboards!

They’re like Padlets without rules… Google Jamboards with more tools… They’re like physical whiteboards, but without having to figure out how to get more than 3 people around the board.

Collaborators can add shapes, images, videos, uploaded files, sticky notes, stickers, voting graphics, and content from Canva’s library of 100 million images, videos, and audio tracks to the collaborative spaces.

I also love how easy flow charts are. Add a shape, click a plus button, and a new shape is automatically connected with a line. But that’s not all, because these boards aren’t just blank canvases… they’ve also got templates—and of course, they’re beautiful templates. As soon as you have them ready to go in whiteboard mode, just share with specific collaborators (or students) and they can jump in and add to the board… or just jump in and watch, because you can choose to let them edit, comment, or view. You can also set it so anyone with the link can access the board. Since commenting and emoji reactions already work in Canva, they work here as well.

I love how visually appealing the interface that shows us where our collaborate are is. No more blinking brown line like we see in Google Docs, here we get colorful cursors!

Now, you don’t have to start with a whiteboard project to use the whiteboard feature. You can be in a presentation and turn it into a whiteboard with just a few clicks. Just right-click on a slide and click ‘expand to whiteboard’.

With this new level of collaboration, they had to put something in there to control the chaos: a timer! So we can now keep our meetings, presentations, activities, and lessons flowing on time.

Finally, just like most other stuff in Canva, your whiteboards can have multiple pages. Of course, you could just move all around the limitless boundaries on one page, but maybe you need a new clean page to work in. You’ve got that option! 

After your whiteboard sessions wrap up, you can send them out as a link or even download them to reflect on later.

[Video(s) Source: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/introducing-canva-whiteboards/ ]

Continue reading Canva adds Whiteboards!