Tech Tip Tuesday: Canvas

You don't have to reinvent the wheel when designing your homepage. Use a fun template that reflects your course and interests. A designed page is a quick way to make your Canvas Course more engaging and unique. Here are some template examples below and directions for importing them to your class.

Canvas Homepage Templates

To download these templates, Log in to Canvas - you have to log in to uccc.instructure.com.

Another way is to go to Canvas and Click Commons- then search for the tag: teacherwinters (nospace) and these templates will display.

If you don't find what you're looking for, you can search for homepage templates in the search bar and browse hundreds of page templates.

Embedding a document to your Canvas page has NEVER been easier. Check out this video to learn how!

Teachers use this feature to embed hyperdocs, slides, pdfs, videos, pictures etc to their Canvas pages. This makes your page much easier to design in the comfort of Google Slides.

If you are using the auto-grading Canvas feature, but not using the auto-syncing, maybe this tip can save you some time! Even starting mid semester, you can sync future assignments starting now and leave previous assignments the way they were.

Several of you don't like the auto sync grades because you want to wait until a certain date before they get pushed to powerschool. In that case, you can still set up the categories in Canvas, but disable the auto sync for that assignment/quiz until you are ready to sync, they you just click and enable.

To save you time on course development, you can cross-list your courses, or bind them together into one platform, while still keeping your student groups separated by period. You can choose to create assignments/quizzes for all the sections of the course or for individual sections so this feature does not limit your ability to differentiate between classes. Just make sure you are cross listing to courses from your current semester, if you make a mistake, you'll have to call the tech department for support and we can get it straightened out.

Canvas Discussions are a powerful tool to use to engage students brick and mortar and virtually. Use discussions to check in and communicate with students, increase engagement, provide feedback, create a space for reflection, check in for office hours with your distance learners.

New Quizzes is a new assessment engine built to meet the assessment needs in your classroom today and in the future. Leveraging modern technologies, New Quizzes features include a series of feature enhancements and new item types, and bring workflow improvements to what is commonly encountered in Quizzes Classic.

To see how New Quizzes tool compares to existing quizzes, please see our New Quizzes Feature Comparison‌.

By the beginning of next school year, the Classic Quizzes will be phased out and New Quizzes will be our main form of quizzes.

The video below is a great resource to show how to navigate the Canvas Help and Canvas Community while simultaneously sharing how to navigate New Quizzes.