How to create your own interactive worksheets on Canva

I recently have been trying to create some interactive worksheets on Canva for my classes. It’s definitely been a learning curve. I’ve only created three so far, but I thought I would share what I have learnt so that you could try it too. The cool thing about creating your own worksheets is that you can tailer them to the lesson you are doing and it’s a great way to test if you students understand the work you are teaching.

Keep user experience in mind

In working with these kinds of worksheets you need to keep two very important things in mind:

1. TEST your worksheets and make sure that they work. If they don’t work or come out the way you want, you have to keep prompting the AI in the chat to change things.
2. Keep the abilities of your students in mind. Will the worksheets be too difficult or too easy? This is another area where you can modify things.

Give clear instructions

Go through the lesson and make a note of the vocabulary that you want to teach. Then figure out what you can do with the vocabulary to make it interesting. What sentence structure do you want to teach? For me, it was all about the animals and the actions. I had to preteach both the animals, then the actions and then put them together.

Keep prompting until you get the desired result

Remember: this is AI. It’s a robot. I have found that particularly with regards to images, they are not that great. With ESL you really need to give clear images to make sure your student understands.

How to create an interactive worksheet on Canva:

1. Go to https://www.canva.com/ai/
2. Type a prompt of what you want. The more specific you are, the better. Make sure that you click on CODE under the text box before you press enter.
3. Check the result and keep prompting till you have something that will work.

My examples:

Lesson 1: Chinese New Year: Zodiac Animals (https://abridgeacademy.com/a1-zodiac-animals/)

Interactive Worksheet prompt: “Create a lesson with a series of interactive worksheets. The vocabulary is the chinese zodiac animals: rat, snake, rabbit, tiger, ox, dragon, dog, monkey, horse, goat, pig, rooster,. Then there is this action vocabulary: run, hop, jump, climb, fly, swim. Then do a drag and drop fill in the sentence: A rabbit can hop. A rooster can fly. A horse can run. A tiger can swim. A monkey can climb”

First prompt: “Can you please change the “jump” image to someone jumping”

Second prompt: “I don’t want a cartwheel. I want an image of someone jumping.”

Still not the best result, but OK.

Final result: https://heathergames.my.canva.site/

Lesson 2: The Great Race: (https://abridgeacademy.com/reading-the-great-race/)

Interactive Worksheet Prompt: Create two interactive worksheets: 1. A board game with moving counters for four people. This tests ordinal numbers 1-12 and uses these animals in this order: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig. 2. A sorting game with the animals where they move them to two areas: It can swim (ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, horse, dog, pig) and it can’t swim (rat, cat, goat, monkey, rooster)

Result: https://heathergames.my.canva.site/chinesezodiacrace

I didn’t have to prompt this one further, but in retrospect, the ordinal numbers were a bit hard for the kids.

Lesson 3: Celebrations around the world: (https://abridgeacademy.com/a2-lunar-new-year-celebrations-around-the-world/)

Interactive Worksheet Prompt: Create interactive worksheets for Lunar New Year around the world: 1. Teach the flags of the following countries: China, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mongolia. 2. Matching interactive game: match the flags to the countries. 3. Teach the vocabulary of each country: China: red envelopes, fireworks, dumplings, dragon dance. Vietnam: bamboo poles, candied fruits, Korea: board games, fly kites, fire 4. Match these to each country in an interactive game.

Further prompts:

Page 2 – no images of flags – please put images of flags.

That’s fine for the first page but please on page 2 “Match flags” we need the images to match to the countries

Result: https://heathergames.my.canva.site/lunarnewyearcountries

I stopped it there because when I prompted it further, I either lost the flags or I lost the drag and drop ability. In the end I settled for rather having accurate flags, and then people could just draw a line.

Conclusion

As you can see, it’s a work in progress, but I think it’s cool and I will definitely use it in the future.

What do you think, and what has your experience been with Canva AI?