WHY KING CANVAS CONTINUES TO REIGN SUPREME

I had an interesting discussion last month about Canvas with a senior on her last day of school. The senior was thanking me for using Canvas, a powerful Learning Management System.  Here’s the gist: The student is attending the University of Iowa this fall, and Iowa is making the transition to use Canvas this summer.  The student ended the brief conversation with “It’s great that I already know how to turn in assignments and check my grades, so thanks for having us use Canvas.”

While I realize this wasn’t a Bette Midler “Wind Beneath My Wings” student-to-teacher compliment, it caught my attention because students generally compliment content (e.g. “Thanks for teaching King Lear!”) or personality (e.g. “I appreciated your sense of humor!) rather than how I deliver instruction.  Because of the source, I appreciated the compliment nevertheless, and it validated my deliberate choice in using Canvas on a daily basis in my English/language arts classroom.

As a teacher in a 1:1 environment, Canvas has simplified my teacher workflow while offering my students a superior place for us to begin and to sustain our inquiry. Our reading, our writing, our speaking, and our viewing activities almost always start in Canvas or continue in Canvas after a short hook or warmup activity. When I ask students to open Canvas, it’s a clear signal to them that it’s time to learn.

“Why don’t you use Google Classroom?” is a question I’m frequently asked at the start of each semester.  And perhaps the improvements Google makes to Classroom over the summer will finally convince me to migrate from my Canvas Free for Teachers account. But to be honest, it will require more than a few improvements to convince me to migrate.

So here are the five reasons I prefer Canvas over so many other Learning Management Systems to orchestrate the learning in my classroom:

1. Canvas simply makes sense to me. It organizes, consolidates, and clearly communicates the most important information to students. I envision learning as a series of inquiry-driven units of instruction. Generally the units begin with essential questions and end with some sort of medium to communicate an individual’s understanding of the essential questions and/or skills. Because my units tend to be two to six weeks long, I divide them by the week. In terms of efficiency, I write the week in the year and the unit’s theme above that week’s assignments. Organizationally, this method of organization makes more sense to me than a stream of assignments. Here’s a student’s view of the final three weeks in my Advanced English 12 course on Canvas:
   

Even though I teach mostly seniors, I still get this habitual question: “I was gone yesterday. Did I miss anything?” Sometimes it is followed by “Did you hand anything back?” or (my personal favorite) “What are we doing today?”

 Using the information on the student’s screen, here are my answers for a student who missed May 10: Your peers viewed 19.1. It’s a TED Talk in Zaption, and then they began writing a Personal Mission Statement in 19.2. It looks like you have eight assignments on your “To Do” list, and I’m seeing several zeroes in “Recent Feedback.” Let’s have a look at your grades after we start the first activity.

All of the information the missing student needs is available on one screen or is but one click away.

2. Powerful assessment tools are built in. Canvas makes frequent formative assessment a snap. Here’s what the Personal Mission Presentation rubric looked like to students:
   
   The formatting isn’t as nice as when I made rubrics using Microsoft Word and printed them on paper, but the look is very close to what my rubrics looked like before I moved to a 1:1 environment.Canvas gets a gold star in my evaluation when it comes to communication about assignments. Not only can I offer assignment directions with this rubric listed below for students, but they can also submit a comment when they submit this assignment. This is where students can offer extra information to me: “This is late because I was sick (excused absence).” or “Don’t forget: I have an incredible fear of speaking in front of my peers. Can I present during your planning period?” or “I worked hard to have the perfect combination of images and dramatic phrasing! Feel free to mark this as an A++++++++!!!!” But it gets even better from the instructor’s side of Canvas. I don’t have to run any scripts or find that perfect extension to offer rich feedback to my students. Instead, Canvas has all of these tools built in.I can open the built-in SpeedGrader function on my laptop or on my iPad, and this is what I will see:
   On the left is a screenshot of the student’s assignment. If this were a Google Doc, I could click a link to see it live. If the student had submitted a PDF, several tools would be available for me to leave annotations and comments directly on the document. On the right is the rubric. I click on a box for each performance category, and the grader awards points. I set up the point totals previously. If I want to go between categories, I can manually enter the points in the far right column. If I want to type comments about that specific category, I can click on the green comment balloon. I click Save when I am done, and then I click on an arrow in Speed Grader to evaluate the next student. If I want to leave more comments, I can scroll down and type comments, speak-to-text comments, or record my comments (audio or audio/visual recording).
3. Canvas allows me to easily group students to differentiate instruction.
   
   Students can self-select their groups, Canvas can randomize groups, or the instructor can decide on group membership. For this unit, Group 1A selected to read, view, respond, and investigate issues about the environment. Meanwhile, Groups 1B and 1C were exploring Popular Culture, and Groups 1D and 1E were exploring Sports and Society.In the assignment window, Canvas allows me to make assignments to the entire class, to groups, or to individuals. This allows me to easily manage differentiated assignments. Imagine if Group 1D and Group 1E are exploring the same topic, but Group 1E needs additional scaffolding. Group Sets make the differentiation more manageable to the teacher and less obvious to the students. The entire class might be working on what I have labeled 10A, but group 1D’s 10A and Group 1E’s 10A have been differentiated with materials and then with different instructions.
4. Canvas offers strong assessment tools and easy integration with formative assessment tools beyond Canvas.
   Let’s say I have decided to have students watch Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk “Grit is the Key to Success.” I’ve created a lesson using that TED Talk in Zaption with multiple-choice questions to gauge their comprehension. After composing the lesson in Zaption, I enter Canvas to make the assignment. I choose Zaption as my External Tool, and then it connects me to Zaption:
   

Students click on the link in Canvas and they are automatically presented with the Zaption lesson in Canvas. When they are done, Zaption sends their score back to Canvas. Having the score automatically sent back saves teacher time, especially with late work. And integrations like this encourage lesson diversity. Thank you, Zaption, for making this integration easy to set up and easy to use!

In addition to Zaption, I have also appreciated SoftChalk’s integration with Canvas. Special thanks to AEA PD Online program director Evan Abbey for figuring out this integration!

Internally, Canvas has advanced analytics for testing. Although I don’t use these to their full potential, I have used some of Canvas’ analytics as we neared AP testing.

 5. Canvas nudges and supports me with alternative means of assessment. Last year I experimented with doing some reports of essential standards using the Learning Mastery gradebook. Canvas’ Mastery Gradebook lets me get a visual of which students need more help to achieve mastery.