AI Tool Demo: Canva’s Text-to-Image Generator

Canva has become an extremely popular tool among educators in recent years. Because Canva is a design platform that offers a wide range of photo- and text-editing tools, as well as thousands of templates, many teachers are turning to it to create presentations, handouts, posters, and other visually engaging resources. The recent Edutopia article “Supercharge Your Canva Projects” explores the many ways the tool can be applied for the classroom. A more recent addition to the feature set—which many users of the platform may have overlooked—is Canva’s artificial intelligence (AI)–powered image generator called Magic Media. 

With the free tool, users can type in a short prompt, choose an image style (like “Watercolor” or “Dreamy”), and generate four different variations of an image in seconds. (If none fit the vision, making the prompt more specific may yield better results.) Teachers can use these images in an existing design such as a presentation or poster, or simply save the images directly.

There are a multitude of learning applications for a tool like this, teachers say. For example, elementary-level English teachers are projecting wacky AI-generated images on the board to inspire their students’ creative writing—prompting students to provide the backstory for the image or somehow incorporate what it depicts into a story.

Meanwhile, some history teachers have found it engaging to ask the AI to produce photorealistic images of historical scenes from before the dawn of photography. While these images are interesting to look at, the AI will often get some of the details incorrect, and teachers can prompt their students to spend some time hunting for any inaccuracies or anachronisms—like a modern-looking rifle being held by an 18th-century soldier.

In this short demo, Edutopia’s assistant editor Daniel Leonard shows how to access and use Canva’s AI image generator. (Since recording, Magic Media has moved away from Canva’s homepage, but it can be found here.) To read about other creative ways teachers are leveraging AI tools in the classroom, check out Leonard’s feature for Edutopia, “9 Tips for Using AI for Learning (and Fun!).”