Earlier today I led some faculty training on how Canvas makes your life easier as a teacher or teaching assistant. Personally, I love Canvas and could come up with a whole host of tips but here are 10 things that stand out to me:
Announcements
Granting individual extensions for any assignment or allowing for a retake of a quiz/exam
Inevitably, every semester, a student will need an extension on an assignment or accidentally click “take a quiz” when they shouldn’t have, or some other problem.
Contact individual students about missing assignments or low grades.
Using the Message Students Who… feature you can easily contact student’s who are missing assignments or score below a certain score. This will allow you to better help your students stay on track in the course.
Notification settings
Canvas provides a plethora of notification settings that you can fine tune to only be notified of what you want to see and when you would like to see them. You can choose to be notified immediately or sent a daily or weekly summary of your notifications.
Prevent or detect plagiarism
Unfortunately, plagiarism is a reality that teachers must address. The Turnitin software that is integrated in Canvas provides an opportunity for student’s to detect their own plagiarism before submitting to better learn how to properly cite and/or allow for teachers to detect potential plagiarism and have the necessary tools to address the students.
Restore deleted files and assignments
Have you ever deleted an assignment, quiz, or file in your course and wanted to recover it? Thankfully Canvas has an easy solution to help you recover those deletions.
SpeedGrader options
SpeedGrader is the best way to grade assignments in Canvas both in a web browser and in the Canvas Teacher app. You can also customize it to provide some more control of the grading process:
Nickname your courses
You can update the names of your course to whatever you would like it to be and it only shows this name for you. Personally, I write an abbreviated version of the course name and put the term in parentheses for my courses.
Canvas Teacher App (iOS and Android)
The Canvas Teacher app allows you to do all the functions you need to do as a teacher in Canvas such as message students, send announcements, update due dates, add files to the course, record video or audio messages, and much more.
Support
Clicking on the help button in Canvas provides the following options (this will differ based on your own school’s implementation but these links are customizable by your school’s administrator)
Contact me on Twitter @renshaw330 or comment below with your own tips.