Canvas
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What can I do using the Canvas mobile app?
The Canvas Teacher mobile app provides quick access to grading, communicating, and updating your course. It delivers added convenience with day-to-day tasks once your core course structure is set up. That’s the philosophy behind the app and it helps us meet the USask Learning Technology Ecosystem Principle of our courses being efficient and easy to use (get the app here: Apple iOS, Android). What typical course tasks work well on the app? Communicating with students (Inbox and announcements) Reading and replying to full-class discussions Editing assignment and quiz details, including due dates Editing pages Providing annotations; text, audio, or video comments; and grades on assignments This works especially well if…
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Office hours in Canvas
Office hours are important because they allow our student to connect with us and ask questions, but they can be time consuming to set up in a remote environment. Using Meets in Canvas, you can quickly and simply set up remote meeting times as “office hours” so your students can sign up for a time to meet with you. You’ll want to do it this way instead of some outside tool because: You can set a block of time, and divide it into any length of appointments You can auto schedule short breaks between appointments You can push one set of office hours to all your classes, so student from…
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How Canvas Supports Learner-Centred Assessment
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba This post is part of a series about using Canvas to integrate the eight Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles. In this post, we look at the Inclusive of learning-centred assessment principle. Inclusive of learning-centred assessment: Learning and feedback are iterative, and assessment comes from multiple sources, including self, peers, teachers, and outside experts. Effective assessment practices follow from a learner-centred teaching approach, with practices designed to produce evidence of the kind of learning you want to measure, aligned with the learning outcomes for the course. Feedback needs to be both affirming and corrective in order for any of us to learn, and if it is unambiguous, specific, frequent, and…
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How Canvas Tools Can Enable Connection
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba This post is part of a series about using Canvas to integrate the eight Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles. You can find more about these principles here; in this post, we look at the seventh principle. Designed to enable connection: Learners exist in accessible networks, and connect to the experiences, concepts, people, and ideas that they need. The importance of connection Research across disciplines – from anthropology, to developmental psychology, to cognitive neuroscience – demonstrates that our sociality is interwoven with our learning processes. Important factors in social pedagogy and in establishing a social learning space include building a sense of belonging and a sense of community, and instructor…
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Managing and Facilitating Discussions in Canvas
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba Once you’ve settled on why and how discussions will be used in your course and have set up the initial discussion(s) and specific guidelines for posting, let students know your plan for how you or a TA will be moderating the posts. Your involvement in discussions, especially initial ones, is vital for guiding the direction for learning – reading, commenting, encouraging, and sometimes redirecting the conversation, helps foster consistent and substantive dialogue between students and with you. Considerations around your involvement, dependent on the types and number of discussions held during the term, include: How much will you be present in the discussions with comments, questions, and…
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Creating Discussions in Canvas to Support Student Learning
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba The technical creation of a discussion in Canvas is relatively straightforward and intuitive. What requires deeper initial consideration is how using the discussion tool will support student learning. Here, we look at the necessary planning for setting up purposeful discussions, then the post that follows, we’ll go through the technical aspects of discussion set-up. This is the first post of four in a series on using the Discussions tool in Canvas. Why use discussions? Substantial research over the past 20 years indicates discussion forums can be places where high quality discussions take place, to rival the quality of in-class discussions and include contributions from all students. As…
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How Canvas’ intuitive interface makes it easy to use
This is the seventh post in a series about how you can use Canvas to integrate the eight Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles. You can find more about these principles here, but in this post, we’ll be looking at the sixth principle. Efficient and easy to use: Learners need to work in a system that is fluid and requires a minimum number of steps in systems that are intuitive and integrated. Efficient and Easy to Use During the search for a new LMS, instructors said ‘ease of use’ was a top principle for choosing technology to support student learning. If a platform is intuitive and easy to navigate, students can focus on their course work…
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Using Canvas New Analytics to see how students are doing in your course.
Having to teach remotely may have left some of us feeling like we are teaching in a vacuum. Without the usual cues that face-to-face teaching provides, it can be difficult to tell whether students are engaging or participating with their course materials. Even if you feel like you have a good sense of how your students are engaging with the course, New Analytics can help confirm these feelings. What is New Analytics? New Analytics is a tool that can track and report student activity within Canvas. Student activity is defined by two data points: Page Views and Participations. The table below shows the difference between the two. How to access New Analytics. You can easily access New Analytics through the course Home Page or from the course navigation menu (if you have set it to…
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How Canvas supports student control and ownership of learning
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba This is the sixth post in a series about how you can use Canvas to integrate the eight Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles. You can find more about these principles here, but in this post, we’ll be looking at the fifth principle. 5. Designed for student control and ownership of learning: Learners create and control spaces for learning, understanding and retaining ownership, and purposefully choosing how and when they share. Student Control and Ownership of Learning Practices that facilitate student choice can have a positive impact on their participation and motivation, and thus, academic performance. Students with choices can engage in higher-level learning for many reasons; feeling more…
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Posting Feedback and Grades in Canvas
Once students start completing quizzes and assignments in your course, you may start wondering how students access this feedback. You may also be wondering if you need to do anything to release the feedback. You may also be wondering, to be frank, about a lot of things. Grade Posting Policy for an Individual Assignment By default, feedback, comments, and grades in Canvas are automatically shared with students as soon as they are generated. This means that as soon as you grade an individual student’s submission, these details will become visible to them. Students may even receive an email notification about this, depending on their notification settings. If you want to…