Browse Canvas How-To Topics

Announcements and Inbox

• Canvas users are able to communicate with their students using both the announcement tool and the email tool.
• Announcements can go to students as an email and be placed on the course home page. 

Assignments

• Assignments are the building blocks for Canvas Gradebook. We create assignments to make columns in the gradebook.
• We can group assignments to apply rules or weights.
• We can create assignments for individual students or groups of students.
• We can also have them do peer-reviews of each others work.

Course Navigation and Settings

• We can control which links appear in Course Navigation to ease student navigation
• In Settings, we can update navigation link options, course details, sections, external app configurations, feature options, and integration

Discussions

• The discussion forum allows us to have discussions with the entire class or smaller group discussions.
• They provide a great place for students to share and expand their understanding.

Files, Pages, and Modules

• You can upload files to the file area one at a time or all at once as a ZIP file and organize them into a folder structure.
• Modules are a system of "containers" in Canvas that allow you to organize your course content and to create dynamic pathways for student learning.
• Pages are a great tool for providing students with structure and what the goals or objectives are for the week or unit.
• We can add external content as well as internal Canvas content to pages to streamline navigation for students so they can focus on engaging in the course materials.

Gradebook and Speedgrader

• The gradebook has all of your graded work including graded quizzes, discussions, and assignments and will calculate a final grade including the letter which can be imported into DuckWeb.
• You can control the release of grades and feedback in the gradebook globally or assignment by assignment.
• The gradebook offers a variety of views and filters to enable you to zoom into specific areas or groups of assignments.

People and Groups

• We can create groups for our students to work in for projects, studying, or just staying connected.
• Groups will have their own mini-site inside the main Canvas site where they can create announcements, post to discussion boards, and share files.

Panopto in Canvas

• You can record video presentations, upload existing video files from your computer, and store all video content for your course in one place.
• If you record videos to provide required or supplemental course content, you can also add quiz questions to your Panopto videos

Quizzes

• The quiz tool enables us to use groups of questions so we can make unique exams for every student.
• We can upload exam questions to question banks from publishers or Word documents.

Zoom in Canvas

• You can provide a clickable Zoom link for your students on the Syllabus page and the Calendar for you course.
• You can also use Zoom to record classroom lectures by connecting it to the room's audio and projection system.