3 Canvas Tricks Every College Instructor Should Know About
If you teach online, or even in the classroom, you’re probably familiar with the popular learning management system, Canvas (it seems to be every college’s go-to LMS these days).
It’s pretty intuitive and easy to use (which is why most instructors tend to prefer it over Blackboard), but there are a few Canvas tools that I’ve recently stumbled upon that have made my experience teaching online even better, faster, and more efficient.
If you don’t use these already, they’ll probably save you some time and energy!
- Use the Canvas app on your phone to check in on your classes. The great thing about Canvas is that all communication between you and your students within the system gets sent directly to your email inbox (so I can still check Canvas messages on my phone). However, if you’ve been having a conversation with a student, you can’t see the entire thread in your email (which, admittedly, can be frustrating), but you can see all full conversations within the Canvas app. You can also check pretty much everything else from your Canvas course very easily through the app, so I highly recommend it!
- Make recent course announcements easy for your students to find. I can’t tell you how many emails I get from students asking questions about something that I already discussed/answered in an announcement, so when I found out that you could put the announcements right on the homepage, I made the change in each of my classes immediately. In ‘Settings’ within ‘Course Details’ under the ‘Description’ box, click on the ‘More Options’ link. Then check the box that says ‘Show recent announcements on course home page,’ and then choose the number of announcements you’d like to show up on the home page. Right now my classes show 3 (and I get far fewer emails about questions I’ve already answered- so I think this tactic is working!), but I might up it to 5 sometime in the near future.
- Disable comments on Canvas Announcements. I don’t know enough about Canvas to know if this feature is new, or if it’s just new to me, but I’m so grateful for it! Follow the instructions for number 2 above, and go all the way to the bottom of the checklist and check ‘Disable comments on announcements.’ This way students can’t comment today on an Announcement you posted two months ago and then wonder why you never responded (Canvas won’t notify you of comments on Announcements).
I hope you find these super simple Canvas tricks helpful! They’ve saved me about 1 hour of work each week for the last few months, which might not sound like a lot, but every little bit adds up!
Happy learning and happy teaching!