Some Great New Canva Features!

In case you missed it, Canva recently released a bunch of new updates to its platform! Many of them use AI to speed up your workflow or make your life easier. There is also a new spreadsheet file type if you are a spreadsheet nerd like me! But this week, I am going to focus on what I believe is the most useful new feature and what I believe is the craziest new feature.

In the past, when you make a multi-page Canva project, all of those pages needed to be exactly the same size and orientation. Let's say you were advertising an event for a club - you would need one file for an 8.5x11 flyer, another file for an Instagram post, and another for an Instagram story. That's a lot of files for one little event! In the latest update, you can now have all different file types included in one single Canva project!

Open up any new or existing Canva project and you will see a little dropdown arrow next to the "New Page" button:

Click that dropdown arrow to choose a new file type to add to your project. You can choose one of the preset options or you can click "More" to search or use a custom file size.

Hopefully this will help make everything in your Canva account a little more organized!

Now for the craziest new update...

Canva Code. It's certainly not perfect, but with this tool, you can tell Canva's AI tool what kind of interactive game or activity you want to create and it will literally write the code to create it. Then it will let you test it out and give it feedback to keep refining the game/activity. It's wild to watch!

To use it, go to the regular Canva homepage and then click the "Canva AI" button above the search bar. Then click "Code for me" and type in a prompt for the game or activity you'd like to create. Then sit back and watch as it literally writes the code for your activity:

Here is what this activity looks like with just the simple prompt of "Make an interactive timeline activity for AP US History that covers the time span from 1900-2001. I want the students to drag events around on the timeline."

Want to see how it works? Click the image above to actually "play" the game and test your knowledge! Just don't feel bad if it says you didn't get many correct...in version 2, I would definitely tell it to create "drop zones" for the events.

Once you are happy with the activity, you can click the purple "Use in a design" button to add it to any type of Canva project, which can then be shared with anyone to let them play!

Have some fun seeing what types of activities Canva can create for your class and don't be afraid to keep going back to the chatbot to make adjustments until you are happy. If you want to learn more or get some more ideas, check out the official Canva Code presentation.