Canva is a perfect design tool for "non-designers" and novices.  Anyone can create a professional-looking design by using Canva's amazingly customizable templates:

• social media
• presentation
• poster
• Facebook cover  image
• Facebook post
• Instagram post
• blog graphic
• document
• card
• email header
• Twitter post
• invitation
• business card
• album/podcast cover
• Twitter header
• Pinterest
• real estate flyer
• Google+  cover image
• Kindle cover
• photo collage
• Facebook ad
• Facebook ap

Or, if you prefer, you can start a new blank project with custom dimensions.  Canva projects can be set to public or private, shared, tagged, and downloaded. Canva includes  access to thousands of free or inexpensive ($1) images through its  image search feature.

The best feature may be Canva's Design School, which includes 30 interactive tutorials, workshops, examples, and lesson plans created by  well-known educational experts such as Steven Anderson and  Vicki Davis.

Biteslide, a school "exercise book" which gives students an "engaging way to research, create, and present school projects online" now offers several project kits for further student guidance. Students create online slidebooks with  the  safe, secure, and easy-to-use website.   Biteslide offers both paid and free plans for teachers. I use the free plan, which allows 1 teacher, 30 students, and 1 project per student.  Additional plans are available at reasonable prices.  Class setup and student registration is  simple.


As of today, Biteslide offers three free kits:

1. A geography digital travel brochure
2. An  Earth and space science kit
3. A history kit,  The Marvelous   Mayans

According to information on the website, Biteslide projects develop 21st century skills including collaboration and critical thinking, and it will help teachers meet core United States and United Kingdom standards.  Because of its simplicity, Biteslide is very useful for younger students, but I have used it with freshmen and sophomores who seemed to be quite engaged by it.

Realtime Board is a whiteboard in your browser which offers engaging features for presenting lessons to your students! Let me start by showing you an example of how I use Realtime Board in my driver education class. Using Google Maps, I show both a satellite view and street view of areas we will be using for driving lessons.  The students  usually recognize the area or try to guess where it is, which makes the lesson more fun and engaging for them. With Realtime Board they are seeing the real locations for our lessons! I can show them in advance  the concepts  to be covered by annotating  live on the screen.  

Images can easily be  placed on your whiteboard, and zooming can be accomplished with  a mouse scroll wheel,  the zoom tool, or a keyboard shortcut.  All  the tools in the toolbar (below) have keyboard shortcuts. You can also place pdfs, documents , and more on your board, and they can be resized as well!

Realtime board offers  sharing, collaboration, and chat. An image library which includes icons, shapes, prototyping objects,  tables, charts, and preset business  canvases such as  app development and business model is included.   You can also upload your own images and create links to  online videos, as well as take screenshots of your board and create a slideshow! And did I mention capturing web pages? Realtime Board is an incredible tool for creating  quality multimedia lessons! If you are a 1:1 school or classroom, sharing/collaborating can be done in "Realtime."  I am not affiliated with Realtime Board in any way, but I highly recommend that you give it a try!