Teachers, students get premium Canva accounts

Public school teachers and other education personnel nationwide will soon enjoy premium access to the popular online graphic design platform Canva in a bid to bring out more creativity within classrooms.

Education Secretary Sonny Angara signed on Wednesday a memorandum of agreement executives of the Australian software company at the Department of Education (DepEd) central office in Pasig City. Australian Ambassador Hae Kyong Yu witnessed the signing.

The program, dubbed as “Canva for Education,” will be rolled out beginning November and according to the DepEd, this partnership is to “bring digital design and creativity into Filipino classrooms and support teachers with user-friendly tools for more interactive learning.”

Students, on the other hand, can begin accessing Canva with premium access in 2025.

‘All-in-one’ platform

The Canva for Education program will be an “all-in-one” visual communication platform for K-12 schools, teachers and students, and this will be “100 percent” free, the DepEd said.

“With it, teachers and students can access all the benefits of Canva’s premium features, empowering them to create, collaborate and communicate visually,” it added.

In his speech during the signing, Angara said this was only a manifestation of what President Marcos said during his State of the Nation Address this year, where he pointed out that “classrooms should be incubators of creativity and innovation.”

“With this partnership, we’re building those incubators, one design at a time,” Angara said.

Along with the free access to Canva is a training that will be rolled out through phased implementation, the education department added.

The pilot training will include select teachers and DepEd central office staff members. This training will then be rolled out to 17 regions starting January 2025.

To freely access this, all teachers and DepEd personnel can simply log in their DepEd email accounts, according to Dennis Legaspi, media relations officer of the Office of the Secretary.

The first pilot implementation was held at the launching with DepEd personnel participating, Legaspi said.

The pilot training, for the central office, will be conducted through its human resource bureau for the DepEd personnel, the National Educators’ Academy of the Philippines for the teachers and through the Information and Communications Technology Service of DepEd for its technical staff.