Welcome back faculty! Here’s a run-down of what’s changed in Canvas over summer.
New to Explore: 
EduApps – Want to transform your course? Bring the best of the web into your course with open integrations. Look in your course Settings to add cool external tools like TedEd, Quizlets, Google Charts, Twitter, Khan Academy, Word Press and more. You can add these to your course without any IT help and most are free! We’ll start exploring these apps one at a time shortly so stay tuned to Canvas Notes.
New Navigation buttons:
- Attendance: Now you can easily mark students present, absent or late; create a seating chart and even award badges for achievements. Best of all, it integrates with the gradebook!
- Chat – it’s back, newly designed and more secure. Give it a try for virtual office hours!
- Evaluations: You’ll see two buttons (Student Evaluation of Courses and Course Evaluation Reports). The Assessment office has successfully concluded a pilot test of an evaluation program this summer, Blue Explorance. You’ll see the buttons come and go during evaluations time. (Students do not see the Course Eval Reports, only the instructor)
Updates to features:
- Assignments: displays quick links to quizzes and discussions in Content Selector sidebar
- Course Copy: add content from an existing Canvas course (Settings > Import Content into this Course)
- Discussions: new organization displays pinned discussions, current and closed, set availability dates and lock non-graded discussions for comments, manually mark messages as read/unread and even toggle to subscribe/unsubscribe to comments
- Groups: instructors can set limits to group membership for self sign-ups and message students who have not yet selected a group reminding them to choose a group
- Gradebook: view grades in Total column by percentage or points – available ONLY for non-weighted assignment groups
- Pages: improved embed image interface for students in the Rich Content Editor; users can now add alternative text to an image (supports accessibility, so let’s make it a habit!) and change image sizes
- People: Your roster now shows the class count in a drop-down menu (replaces Settings>Users)
- Profile: You can add a profile picture directly from the Profile page or use the editing icon that shows when you hover over the current picture if you’d like to change your picture
- Quizzes – You can download separate CSV files for analyzing quiz statistics such as a student analysis or an item analysis; there’s a new quiz question type “file upload question” (will require manual grading)
For more details watch the Canvas New Release Screencasts from Instructure on Vimeo or check out the text details in the Canvas community.
06.01.13 06.22.13 07.13.13 08.13.13
Have a great semester!
Speak Your Mind