Madison County School District

When a pilot program turned out to be a smashing success, Madison Country School District implemented Canvas LMS to the entire district to support its BYOD program. Teachers and students have embraced e-learning using Canvas, which is not just driving down absenteeism, it’s preparing students for the future.

When it comes to technology in learning, the Madison County School District in northern Alabama is ambitious—more ambitious than its funding can easily accommodate. They had technology in their classrooms, but not enough for everyone, so they opted for a BYOD approach to fill in the gaps. With devices in the hands of every student, they soon realized the need for an LMS that would bring everyone to the same page.

Their current conglomeration of LMSs required students to use as many as three dierent platforms throughout the day (and parents of multiple students to log in to as many as five dierent platforms to stay current on their kids’ schoolwork.) “That was not an ideal situation for our students, teachers, or parents,” said Superintendent Matt Massey. So Madison County set out on a search for a single, unifying LMS.

Madison County formed a committee of K-12 teachers, central oce personnel, and technology specialists and arranged demos with various LMS providers to see how their platforms would work with the district’s BYOD initiative.

The committee immediately loved the overall functionality of Canvas, its ease of use, and its suite of features—especially SpeedGrader. They were also very happy with the Canvas-Google integration, as they planned to move to Google for email and documentation in the near future. Madison County decided to pilot Canvas with one high school in the spring of 2015. All teachers, students, and committee members received accounts and learned how to use Canvas for day-to-day schoolwork. The pilot was a smashing success; Canvas integrated well with the district’s SIS, and teachers found it surprisingly easy to transfer their courses to Canvas. “The success of the Canvas pilot convinced us that this was the right LMS for our district,” Massey said.

Madison County decided to roll out Canvas to the entire district that fall, and subsequently set up workshops and small-group training sessions over the summer to help the faculty prepare. The training went “really, really well,” said Vickey Sullivan, Madison County Schools’ instructional technology specialist. Teachers who were initially unsure about the new tool were able to see the potential right away. “I didn't think I would be able to use Canvas in a meaningful way with my students, but after this class, I realize there are many ways to use the program to enhance their learning,” says 5th-grade teacher Tammy McGee Jones.

“Our students feel like we’re preparing them for the future.”

-Vickey Sullivan, Instructional Technology Specialist, Madison County School District.

Madison County officially launched Canvas to more than 19,000 students and 1,400 teachers at the beginning of the 2015 school year. One of the first testaments to the impact of Canvas came during an e-learning experiment during traditional teacher professional development days, which were half-days for students. District leadership allowed students to have remote access so they could complete their coursework on Canvas from home, a library, or a coee shop to mitigate poor attendance rates on these days. The experiment was a big hit, substantially lowering absenteeism and giving teachers a full day for PD. On one of these PD days, the school district hosted a “Canvas Camp” allowing teachers to network and share ideas about the different ways they were using Canvas in their classrooms.

In addition to helping Madison County achieve its technology-in-the-classroom goals, Canvas has helped the school district prepare its students for the road ahead. “Our students feel like we’re preparing them for the future,” Sullivan said. “Many colleges and universities in Alabama use Canvas, and we wanted our seniors to be able to use it easily and hit the ground running with their college coursework.”

“We can also see how this is important at all grade levels. We’re encouraging our elementary teachers to use Canvas as a major form of communication with students and parents for the 2016-17 school year—we want to make sure our elementary students are doing enough with Canvas that they’re familiar with it when they get to middle school, and that it’s second nature by the time they’re in high school.”