What I love about Canvas – and…
I am just ending week two in my course with 36 students, a textbook that is back ordered for some students, and a couple of minor issues in the computer lab I teach in.
I have 12 students taking the fully online version and the rest are all face-2-face. The class is sold out, meaning this is all the students I can handle for this hands on based course, and there are no bubble sheet quizes or assignments here. I grade them all one by one, pouring over HTML and CSS code the students have written.
Speed Grader iPad App Rocks
I am a huge fan of the Canvas iPad SpeedGrader app. It is amazing and works very well for my class. It displays the document the student turned in and I can easily grade, add comments, use a rubric, and simply swipe to the next assignment. A simple reminder on the iPad icon tells me I have assignments to grade. I find with this tool I grade assignments in a more timely fashion. I do it in between events such as meetings, kids activities, etc. I estimate that this app alone has cut the logistics fo grading down by over 40%, and may be as high as 60%. I no longer have to download the document they turned in, open it in a program, then go back to the LMS to enter comments and grades.
The speed grader inside of Canvas is pretty cool too.
Rich Text Editor
This was one of the very first things that caught my eye about Canvas. The Rich Text editor is everywhere. In an announcement, discussions, conversations (email per se), quizzes, pages, assignments etc. The cool thing about it that totally blew me away was the ability to link to other content elements including content pages, discussions, assignments, quizzes. That means right in a content page, and announcement, assignment, etc, I can simply place links to pretty much anything in my course and it is easy to do. No sneaky javascript hacks like I had to do in Blackboard. It is something I begged Blackboard to implement. It never happened.
Conversing with students through Assignments
Another feature that I did not realize was there until I taught my first course in Canvas was the ability to have a conversation with a student through the Assignment tool. This is cool. I am able to give students feedback, ask them to fix something and return it, and receive their comments and replies right there. Some if it happens really quickly especially is students have signed up for alerts.
Challenges
I am still struggling with Discussions in Canvas. They are there, they work, but in a much different way (facebook like) than I as a online instrutor with 15 years of online experience, am used too. I think the workflow needs to be improved on how they all work. There is much discussion about this among Canvas users on the help.instructure.canvas site.
That is it for now.
I should be posting more often now that the course is under way. I still have to build out some content for later in the semester. That’s this weekends project.