Welcome to episode 3 of Tech Tuesday! This week I’m focusing on the Learning Management System, Canvas and want to give you some tips on the product.
Before I jump fully into these tips and tricks, let’s talk about what a Learning Management System or an LMS is. An LMS is designed to be a way to extend your classroom and create opportunities for blended learning, that is activities that connect between face to face and online time. Activities shouldn’t just be face to face or just online, but extend the learning going on in both avenues.
The other thing to keep in mind is that an LMS is designed for student use. This is the way your students will continue to connect with your content and should be designed in a way for them to move through your course. In other words, your Canvas course should not be designed for only teacher use or as a storage warehouse for activities.
The Calendar
My first tip on Canvas’ features is on the calendar. Instructure, the parent company behind Canvas, places emphasis on the calendar as one of the most important features of the product. This is where both teachers and students can see important events, reminders, and assignment deadlines.
On the right side navigation, users will see their personal calendar listed first and underneath this are the calendars for each course a teacher teaches or that students are enrolled in. You can filter for each calendar by selecting it. When there is no color showing in the box and the text is grayed out, that means this calendar view is off. Click on it again to see appointments for that calendar. This allows you to view as many calendars at one time as you want.
Whenever an assignment with a due date is created within the course, it will also be automatically added to the course’s calendar. This is very important to remember as this should be the first place for students (and any parent observers) to see when assignments are due. I encourage you to help students get into the habit of checking the calendars and utilizing them to their full potential.
Now let’s go back to the personal calendar for a moment. Students can add their own events and reminders, with the calendar acting as a digital daily planner. Teachers can do the same, but also create assignments from this view. You’ll also notice there’s a tab for appointment groups. I don’t remember seeing this before, so when I looked up what it does, I discovered it’s more for scheduling office hours, which in my school district we don’t do. This makes complete sense Canvas offers this though, as originally Canvas was a product for colleges and universities and filtered down to K-12 institutions.
My next thought was could this be used for parents to book appointments during Parent Teacher conferences? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Since parents are only observers in Canvas and don’t have full access permissions, this is something that is not viewable with a parent account. However, if you’re interested in doing something like this, I would recommend Google’s appointment slot feature in Google Calendar. This could allow you to have parents sign up for time slots. Here’s directions for how to do this. I’m also including directions for creating appointment groups in Canvas if you think of a way to use it or are in a school that offers office hours to students, plus directions for how students can sign up for appointments too.
Understanding Modules
The next feature we’ll talk about is modules. I find modules can be complicated to understand at first, so this is how I explain it. Modules control the flow of your course and its content. You, as the teacher, can add modules, add items such as assignments or discussions to modules, and manage module settings.
So how do you create module flow for students? One of the best ways is to create modules either by week or by content units and package the activities they will interact with. What I usually see in a course, is something like this, a list of activities randomly put into a module as the teacher has created it. None of the activities actually link together.
But here’s a better way: one of the first things we do in a unit is introduce the topic to students, so we have our notes. When I click on the link to the notes page, it also shows the objectives for that day or the agenda of what we’re doing in class. Most of us have this posted somewhere in our physical classrooms, but remember, Canvas is an extension of our classroom. This serves as a reminder to students of what will happen in class that day and helps out those who may not have been in class. It also helps stop the question, “what are we doing in class today?” as students can log in to Canvas and see what the day’s agenda is.
If you look at my agenda, you’ll see I can link to any of the items I need in Canvas. All you do is type your text, highlight, and choose the item type from the right side navigation, find the resource and click on it to create the link.
Next, the notes are embedded on the Canvas page for all students to have access to during and after class. This allows students to follow along with you or go back and review as needed. Once I’m done with my direct instruction time, it’s usually time for an activity to allow students to practice applying their new information. If I’ve decided this activity is better done face-to-face, you can add text to this page to let students know what the next step is and even to explain the activity. However, if it’s an online activity, rather than have students go back to the module page and pick the next activity, because I’ve made this module to flow, I can have students select the next button and move to the next activity.
You can also use text headers as Titles to break up the activities within a module and group your warm-ups, notes, and other materials together.
Two Assignment Tips
I’ve got two tips about assignments for you. The first is about setting an availability date. When you create an assignment, you have to pick an option to save and publish or just save. If you’re setting up assignments ahead of time, but don’t want students to have access to it until a certain time period, it can be annoying to try and remember to publish it at a certain time. So you can publish the assignment instead and set a date for when it should be made available to students instead. This will save you time and hassle.
The other tip is about adding external tools to assignments. In the last episode, I highlighted how Google Drive can be integrated with Canvas. Go here if you haven’t watched it yet. But Google Drive isn’t the only app that can be integrated. Several of the most popular edtech products are able to be integrated too such as Flipgrid, EdPuzzle, BrainPop and more.
Student View
If at any time you want to see what students see in your course, click the home button and on the right side navigation, click on student view. This will allow you to view your entire course as a student.
The Canvas Guides
Finally, my last tip is to check out the Canvas guides. These are located under the help icon on the left side navigation and can be a good place to learn about the many various features of Canvas. There are written directions as well as videos provided.
I hope these tips will come in handy as you continue to use Canvas. If you have other tips you would like to share for a future episode, please contact me through email or on social media at @mspriester_itrt.
A New Schedule
I want to take a moment and talk about the production schedule of Tech Tuesday. I’ve been producing episodes to come out every two weeks and at this moment I feel like it’s a lot. This all might be part of the normal stress that comes with the beginning of a school year.
I’m not sure, but I feel in order to continue giving all of you consistency and keep up with the standards I expect in each episode, I’ve decided to add another week to production and have episodes come out every three weeks. I hope this will not be an inconvenience, but instead allow me to continue providing technology integration ideas on a less stressful timeline.
As always, thank you for watching and I’ll see you in three weeks on October 1st.
Ms Priester EDU 