How to create teaching materials that inspire learners: 10 best Canva templates for interactive learning experiences

Kyla Ball June 11, 2021

Canva and ThingLink together have been used to create some wonderful interactive educational resources and learning materials. We have picked top 10 and converted them to special Canva templates you can use with students!

Canva is a favorite graphic design app for so many educators mainly because its intuitive drag-and-drop interface is so easy to learn and use by anyone, designers and non-designers alike. The same goes with ThingLink – we make interactive and immersive media creation easy for everyone. In addition to our integration that brings Canva directly to ThingLink’s editor flow, our team has curated a collection of top 10 use examples for education and teaching resources and turned these into cool interactive design templates that are available for teachers on the free Canva and ThingLink education accounts!

In Canva you can follow step-by-step tutorials from complete beginner level through to advanced.

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Power up your interactive educational materials with these free Canva templates designed for ThingLink use!

From interactive campus tours to course roadmaps, weekly schedules, choice boards and interactive resumes, ThingLink users have in the past 12 months taken digital learning and instructional material creation to a whole new level. After releasing our new Canva integration, we have seen ideas and examples that simply cannot be kept from the rest of the education community, so Louise and Kyla from our team started working to turn these ideas into templates everyone could use! These have been designed for student learning, but could be adapted for online courses, in person or remote tutorials, professional development modules or in fact any learning environment.

Some great examples of teaching material templates you can start using today:

Course Road Map
A clean and simple infographic
A timetable for younger students
A simple virtual classroom
Class choice boards
Campus tours
Create your own 360 images
Video Compilation
Shoppable portfolio with a “website” feel
An interactive resume

1. Course Road Map
This road map has been used for a course overview, but could easily be adapted so that each point leads to a chapter or module of a course itself via tour tags, or via hyperlinks in multimedia text and media tags. Grab the Canva template here!

What to create with this template: educational journeys, lesson plans, timelines throughout history, course structures, learning objectives.

2. A clean and simple infographic designed to welcome new starters at a high school
We have created a pared-back template of this infographic which you can customize with your own school logo and images. You could even include password-protected content for individual groups of students, via the conditional transitions feature within the tour tag. This template could just as easily be used in an Enterprise environment as an Induction pack for new starters. Thank you to Stirling High School and Deputy Head Teacher Alan Hamilton for sharing their wonderful creations.

What to create with this template: course materials, virtual tours of certain places, or geo-locations.

3. A timetable for younger students
Adapt this template to make it as detailed as you like! We have used simple icons from Canva’s library. Use a more sophisticated color scheme and font and this could easily become a schedule for a conference or webinar.

What to create with this template: course calendars, course activities, student activities, student program calendars.

4. A simple virtual classroom, created using one of Canva’s huge libraries of similar templates.
Add furniture, add a Bitmoji teacher, swap the colors and content around! Using this template as a starter, why not create a Virtual Museum, or even an Escape Room, using conditional transitions with the tour tag? Hide clues around the room! Here’s the Canva template.

What to create with this template: add quizzes or progress tests, or embed daily videos for your students with explanations of the work they will be doing that day.

5. Class choice boards
Lorrie Salome’s brilliant Canva templates for her maths class choice boards are a firm favourite with ThingLinkers. Why not adapt them for use as meal planners or menu boards or choice boards for virtual gym or fitness classes? Lorrie has kindly shared two versions of her templates for you to adapt in Canva. Which is your favorite – Choice Board 1 or Choice Board 2?

What to create with this template: course calendars, lessons summaries, course summaries, worksheets, bulletin board.

6. Campus tours – take your pick from these two versions of an introduction to a campus tour!

Either of these easy-to-adapt templates could be embedded in your website and have hundreds of applications: campsites, sports facilities, farmers markets…Try out the Willow Creek and Aerial View Canva templates.

What to create with this template: virtual tours of campsites, virtual tours of schools, virtual tours of universities for senior year students, virtual school trips.

7. Create your own 360 images without any expensive camera equipment.
These two ThingLinkers took our 360 “Fake it” template and created an art and an astronomy gallery! You could also use it as the basis for any non-linear course, using the tour tag. What will you create with yours? Thank you to Adriana Stanzione and Maria Dente who shared these in our Facebook Community.

What to create with this template: 360 tours of major cities around the world, astronomy galleries.

8. Video Compilation
You can create a really impactful single-scene ThingLink like this to host videos, using one of Canva’s millions of free images or videos as your background. Canva also now has a built in video editor so you can ensure your videos are on-point too! This would work well for a science fair, or any asynchronous online event, or for short video intros to the team for an induction pack! Try the template for free here.

What to create with this template: science fair videos, online event videos, lessons, course summaries.

9. Shoppable portfolio with a “website” feel
This example showcases the awesome design power of Canva, using stock images, fonts and layouts. It also highlights the versatility of ThingLink, showing how you can create a tour with the look, feel and navigational approach of a website. This template has limitless potential – for portfolios, virtual fairs, events and so much more! Here is the Canva template for you to give it a try!

What to create with this template: portfolios, virtual fairs, virtual events, mock websites for business or social studies.

10. And finally…an interactive resume
Stand out from the crowd and demonstrate your digital skills and knowledge of online tools, with an eye-catching and info-packed resume. Update and edit whenever you need, using the integrated editing capability of Canva x ThingLink. Grab the template here.

What to create with this template: resumes, portfolios, case studies.

How does the ThingLink Canva integration work?

Thanks to the new integration, your background image can now be created and edited directly in ThingLink. If you’re signed in to your Canva account, you can also access all your own previous and current designs and uploads. So whether you need to change the entire background image, or just update a tiny piece of text – you can do it all in ThingLink!

Learn more about the free Canva for Education account (currently available for K-12 teachers and their students).

How would you develop these learning materials?

For each template we have provided a list of suggestions of what else they could be used for. Use the templates as a starting point and with a little practise and application you’ll soon see what works for you and how each can be optimized for your own learners. When you create projects with ThingLink and Canva, we’d love you to share your designs with us, and get featured in our social media communities and blog!