Texas educators are poised to meet in Austin on June 7 to discuss the role of emerging technologies in the classroom.

In a nutshell

Spearheaded by Jason Wilmot, Canva's head of education, this discussion will introduce educators to new, free tools offered by Canva for Education. The tools are aimed at cutting down the time teachers spend on lesson plans and increasing the time they have to spend engaging with students, Wilmot said.

Zooming in

The initiative to emphasize technology in the classroom is rooted in the need to support educators, Wilmot said.


“Recently, we steered our [artificial intelligence] capabilities to support educators by ensuring our solutions save teachers time while making the complex simple and, importantly, bringing student imagination to life with the touch of a button,” Wilmot said.

The company recently launched a suite of tools for education that utilize AI. With the tools provided, a teacher can describe a presentation to be automatically created for them, Wilmot said. There are other features available, including a text-to-image aspect in which teachers are able to turn an idea into a design as well as a translate feature that takes any text and turns it into a design in more than 100 different languages. Wilmot said there is also a video feature in which videos can be matched up to the beat of a soundtrack without any manual edits. All of these features and more are free and can be found on the Canva for Education website, Wilmot said.

Quote of note

“We're excited to bring the magic of AI to our global education community with a strong emphasis on responsibility, simplicity, and creativity,” Wilmot said. “It's important for educators to use because visual communication is becoming a necessity, and it is not taught commonly in schools. We offer this for free to help educators communicate in a visual manner and set them up for success.”