All About Canvas

 So ........,  Canvas.

Intimidated?  Scared?  Lost?  Feeling a little like this?

I have been playing around with Canvas all during summer school and have really dived in to push this program to the limits this past couple of weeks.  I am pretty impressed with what I have found.  First of all, don't be afraid of it.  If you haven't already, make a sandbox and play around.  You are not going to break it (although Melanie Lewis tried, sorry Mel, had to call you out on that one 🤣😂)  Invite other teachers to your sandbox course as students to practice giving assignments and grading them.  Make sure you get invited to their courses too.  That way you can see what your students would see in your course.  Play with it and have fun.

To help you all out, I have been a busy little bee 🐝 creating how-to videos.  Each of these videos has been added to the Academic Professional Development-Virtual Learning Google Classroom (yeah, sorry for all the email notifications you have been getting).  Just click on the "Classwork" tab, then look under the "Technology Resources" topic.

I have also created my own Canvas course that includes examples of how pages can be set up, including a homepage with clickable pictures that take students to various informative pages (all about me, syllabus, I'm lost so now what, etc).  If you would like to be added to this course so you can see what I have been working on, please send me an email at thowell@amherst.k12.va.us and I will send you an invitation.  I have put all of my Canvas videos in that course as well so they are all in one place.  I am making and updating that daily so there should always be something new to check out.  (and it will all be in one place).

If you have a specific question about how to do something in Canvas, just add it to this Doc here.  The highlighted topics are ones I have already created videos on.  I will check this Doc periodically as we go through because you might not know yet what you want but will find a need for something as you have students enrolled and your classes begin.

Canvas Video Request Doc

In the meantime, here are the videos I have already created.  As I make more, I will put them in my Canvas Help course, post them in the Academic Professional Development-Virtual Learning Google Classroom, and edit this post so they are here too.  I want to give everyone lots of options for how to access this information and feel that it is important if all of the videos are in one place to make it a one-stop-shop.

So grab some popcorn, get comfortable, and enjoy the following:

Creating a Course	Setting course navigation for student	Setting a homepage
Creating and adding content to modules	Adding Google files to Canvas	Student view-Uploading Google files to Canvas
Embedding a Google Form Quiz in Canvas	Authorizing Google accounts for instructors and students	Having students edit PDF's and submit in Canvas
Homepage, Landing page, and adding buttons	Using the inbox	Recording video lessons

I hope this helps some and takes some of the pressure off.  Please let me know if there is anything else that I can do.  

And just throwing this out there for the fun of it.  This is a meme I ran across on Facebook this week: