Canvas is the basic website builder tool that schools, teachers, and professors are using to better operate online classrooms.
The last several years of my teaching career have been centered around online learning. On top of a global pandemic and quick transition to online alternatives, my school district has implemented an online and digital one-to-one device policy years prior. By no means were they ahead of the curve of the pandemic and worst-case scenarios but it definitely provided enough resources and foundation to keep the education machine moving. It also provided hours of entertainment as the youngster teachers like myself grinned at the “veterans” and “old-timers” making snark comments and insults at some of the tools being given to us.
Canvas has a lot of options for schools, colleges, and universities. Your mileage may vary from what you see on my end, but the skeleton and foundation of its operations and options should be there still. Canvas typically creates “classes” based on your course, the students enrolled, and whatever your guidance or admins office folks set up. Usually, they do that with some backend software built around school management, records, and grades. In my case, and in Orange County Public Schools in Florida, Skyward is the management program for all of that, and it sends information to the school’s Canvas software to generate classes with specific students enrolled.
You can also create “sandboxes” which are basically classes, but without any sort of student assignment, school management software backend attached, and it’s just meant to be a “practice” or “here’s a concept” workspace. You can even add photos, give the classes or sandboxes nicknames, and share them with other teachers in your learning community. There are also options to download the entire course to a thumb drive for even more archive options.
I teach three levels in my program, so ideally the content and materials I produce can be stored in sandboxes labeled for each class. DVT 1, DVT 2, and DVT 3. Now – the big appeal of Canvas is the idea of long-term success and stability in classrooms. You can have all your notes, lessons, documents, materials, and assessments saved and ready to be copied over to the next class at the completion of a semester or school year. So these sandboxes are “blueprints” for all my future students and their respective classes. I can jump into the sandboxes, change some stuff up if necessary, and then copy all of its content to the “official” class canvas page that my guidance and school leaders generate. The same can be true for you.
Now when you first go into a sandbox, you won’t have anything. But that’s where “Modules” come in handy. Click the blue module button towards the top right and you’ll be greeted with the option to create one. The way I like my class may vary from yours, but I like to have a couple of modules created to store basic class information, and quizzes, and then I do 2-week intervals.
Without too many insults towards some of my current and former students, whatever I can do to help organize the class and make things easier to find usually helps them succeed more. Gotta hold hands sometimes in education but they’ll grow, trust me. In class I’ll say “okay, log onto canvas, load my course up, and go to Weeks 1 and 2 module. I have some notes to go over, follow along”. I also like that stuff being there in case they’re absent, they want to review later on, and even showcase it to their friends and family.
Canvas allows you to create different things within the modules. Once you create a module, you’ll see a plus sign next to it that opens up a new menu. Here you’ll see “assignments, quizzes, pages” etc. Quizzes are self-explanatory – you can go in and create quizzes and tests with questions, answers, and interactive options. Assignments allow you to put rubrics up, explain projects, etc. Discussions are message board-style discussions where everyone in the class can communicate and share, maybe responding to a question prompt or reflecting on something.
Now it’s imperative that you speak with your guidance team or school leadership in order to fully utilize Canvas in parallel to the school’s management tools. Skyward is used in my district, and the school district has systems in place to take grades and information from canvas courses, then send it to Skyward and translate it, if you will, correctly to each individual student. Skyward then handles school records, progress reports, report cards, etc. It’s also worth noting that there is a message and contact system in place on Canvas. On the left side of the screen, it’s the little inbox icon. You can click that and it’s a very simple email-style system built into Canvas. Those messages always go through Canvas to the students (and parents/guardians if they know how to log in) but depending on your school’s entire setup, those messages can also get forwarded to student and parent email accounts. We have Google accounts for all students so they can receive canvas messages in their Gmail as well.
Oh, if you happened to notice the images above, I put movie frames as the images for each canvas course. You can do that. And you can do GIFs as well! You want to click the desired course and let its page load. Then on the bottom left (you may have to scroll) click settings. Then a page pops up that has options to rename and upload an image. Be careful here, and please consult some experienced teachers or your school leaders, as there are some advanced options like course codes and features. You should hopefully get a guide or training on how the school or district wants certain features set up. I’ll go over the specifics of OCPS in my video.
If there’s ever anything else you can think of to add or if you have questions feel free to reach out to me. Remember – keep it simple, this is just one tool in a long line of resources teachers should have to help their students.