Canvas Certified Technical Admin: What I Wish I Would Have Known

Alright. So we got folks in the other room watching through Zoom. So So, alright. So as we go through today, just a little bit about me. I spent twenty years, well, nineteen and a half in the classroom. I taught middle school math.

I know. It was an adventure. Seventh and eighth grade math. I taught pre algebra algebra geometry. I taught honors geometry and honors algebra.

I was an e learning and information specialist for five and a half years. This is my fifth year as a canvas admin in my district. I taught online summer school for ten years, using angel And what was the other? D2L, and the year I left, they were switching to Canvas. So And then I am a certified educator. I'm a certified technical admin, and I facilitate both of those sets of courses as well.

And I'm also a certified coach. And as you can see, I'm I have my wife is a nurse. My son there in the middle who loves having his picture taken is, biology student, and then we have our Shelby down there at the bottom. A little bit about my district, we are located on the east side of Indianapolis, Indiana, We have approximately eleven thousand five hundred students. Across K through twelve, we have about eight hundred staff and fifteen different buildings.

So we have nine elementaries. We have three intermediate middle schools. We have a high school. We have a career center. Our high school has about four thousand students in it.

We have a career center. We just started an online academy two years ago, I think. And then we have our alternative school as well. So Today, what I would like for you to what I would like to do is take you through my journey as a Canvas admin. And kinda let you show you how things have changed how the CCTA program has helped with what I'm doing.

My first year, I started in August of twenty nineteen. As a Canvas admin, that was my first year as an admin for the district. My previous, I at a school. I was the admin for just the one high school. In twenty nineteen, they had already adopted the school system.

My man Warren had already adopted Canvas. They had already had everything set up I started in September of that year, with as the Canvas admin. So I was kind of learning the ropes, as the Canvas admin kind of thrown in. It's just me and my role. So I don't have an instructional designers with me.

I don't have, a team. It is just me in my role. So I was trying to figure everything out as we started. We had an original plan of rolling out Canvas to the high school, the first year, the middle school in the spring, and then the following year the elementaries. Well, then came the spring of twenty twenty, and that all changed.

And so that kind of really I really wasn't part I wasn't focused on the Canvas admin side. It was I'm we gotta get everybody in Canvas. We gotta train everybody. We've gotta get them where they need to be. So that was my first year.

Just kind of feeling everything out and getting the training for the staff. The second year It was chaos. It was still. I was not really I knew about the the provisioning. I knew about the CSV reports.

I knew about the permissions. I knew about all those things, but I I never really dove into those. I never had the connections that I could ask someone questions. It was, like I said, it was just me. And we had, I'm not sure about the schedule you all had, but we had every other day.

So we had some students, ours were I hate to say this. Black and Gold Days. I'm an IU fan, so the black and gold from Purdue would that So it was black and gold day. So we had half of our students in person that day, the other ones were home working virtually. And then we rotate it.

So that second year, it was still it was still me trying to figure things out. It was still the training. I was in the schools, trying to get everybody's courses set up, trying to get things Okay. Trying to get things the way they needed to be, but I again, I didn't have the time to dive into all the admin stuff. It just I just didn't have that time.

I was in the nine elementaries every other day. I was in a different school every other day. I have an office in a building. I'm never in that building. So that second year, it was chaos.

The third year came along. Things got a little bit better. We started to get into a routine with training. We started to, get into a routine with everyone feeling more comfortable using Canvas. So I could kind of step back a little bit from all the training.

And then that's when the certified educator program came in. So I took those courses, and so then I that helped immensely. We started rolling out a different professional development. So that helped. Then came year four.

And that's when things really started to change this past year. That's when I joined or I started taking the certified educator program. That's when things made a difference. We were back in person So I still had the training that I needed to do for the new teachers. I still needed to get everything set up for the new school year.

I still needed all of that information, but I really now had time to start looking at the certified, the the admin side. I could we're in our we were in our fourth year So I had my the instructional coaches that were in buildings. They could start answering some of those questions about the training. They could help the teachers get their courses set up. They could help them with their templates.

They could help them create quizzes. We rolled out a new professional learning portal in our school. We put that in the global navigation for our school system. So all of the training was there. We uploaded videos.

We had everything there for the teachers and they could go in. It's we called it warm plus off of Disney plus. And so we had five to ten minute videos where they could go in and they could click on how do I make a quiz. And it was me showing them how to make a quiz. Yeah.

They could go to the community, but hearing it from someone in the district made a lot more sense to him. And so I was able to put those videos up there for them. I was able to get those things going so that they're now they know where to get the resources. But that year four is when I started the the CCTA program, and that's when it was like, wow. I finally understand it's finally making sense.

So when we when I started the program, they the the way it helped me was it provided me with resources. I didn't have to comb the Canvas guides. I didn't have to search for anything, and make sure I answered that or asked that question correctly. It gave me the resources that I needed that I could go through and I could find. I had in those resources they took the community guides, and they put them all in one place for me.

So I didn't have to if I was looking at permissions, everything about permissions was in one place. It was all organized for me. It made a whole lot of sense for me. There were slide decks that walked me through step by step. This is what you need to do.

This what the permissions are. This is where the settings are. We had Google, slide decks or I'm sorry. We had sheets that each tab was the different admin settings that I could go in and I could click on the admin settings and I can explore this is what it does. This is what who needs to use it.

This is where it's at. And so it was all there for me, and it made so much more sense to me. All the resources were there, and I knew where I could go to find that information. There were interactive infographics. They used FING link, to go in and, if you've used thing like before, you know, you can put an image in there and videos would pop up.

So we could go in and we could see permissions. We could see the different features And it would ask us questions. Okay. Here's what this is. This is where you need to go to find it.

And it was a link there. So it took us right where we needed to go. And it for the first time, I had all the resources that I needed in one place. It was there for me. The assignments that we had, they asked us to build certain things, and the assignments had questions in them that would ask certain questions.

So and it was there to help me think about. Okay. Why is Why did they organize our account the way they did when it was started? Why was it that all of my schools are separate in the subaccount. And so it asked me questions and I had to go in and like I said, I was the only person, so I had to go out and find those answers. I had to go to okay.

Our cis team. Why? What are we doing here? Why is this the way it is? And so it made more sense to me that way. And it provided a focus for me so that I knew what I needed to do, and I knew where the resources were. Then once I had that, it allowed me to dig deeper. It allowed me because had all the permissions.

I didn't have to. Every time I forgot what a permission does, I didn't have to go to the community, didn't have to search it, then find it in the list of permissions. It was organized in the Google sheet for me. So I could go in and I could dig deeper on those permissions. And I had the time because the assignments that were asking us, I had to spend more time on those.

And it allowed me to take my time going through each of those permissions, each one of the settings, each one of the features that I didn't know was there. For example, I didn't know on notifications that I could customize the the response email. It always says you have a notification from Instructure. Well, I didn't know until just this past fall that I could go in I could change that to you have a notification from MSD Warren Instructure. So the students knew they were getting a notification from us, not from just in structure, it came from us.

So I was able to dig deeper in those in those things, in those items and things started making sense to me. I could go through, like, I knew the permissions were there, but I would always have to ask I would email Jackie and ask, okay, I want this person needs this permission. What do I need? But because I had that resource of the permissions all in one document with all of the information in a spreadsheet right there beside me, I could find the permission I was looking for, and it it also said, this permission, you need to add these also. So it made more sense to me, and I could spend more time because I didn't have to spend so much time digging and hunting and finding resources, it was there for me. And things started to make sense, and I was able to go through, and I was starting make, ask questions.

I was starting to, okay, why is this? Why do we have that? What does everyone have that? And that's where the connections came in because I was in this program, and I was in that course with other admin, I was then able to go in and start asking questions. I was able to send, admin across the country. I was asking higher ed. I was asking k twelve. I was getting everyone's opinions and thoughts and, well, don't forget to think about this and don't forget to think about that.

But I was making those connections with admin across the the country. I was able to ask questions I didn't have to. I was getting answers to my questions from other admin because like I said, this was my first I was just starting. I was just learning. And so I was able to make those connections with the admin across the country, different grade levels, different tutians.

Starting not only in the course, in the discussions that we had, but I was able then to get emails and jump on emails. We would jump on, Zoom calls. And they would walk me through the steps so that I knew what I was looking for. And so those connections really helped. I was making the connections on Twitter.

I was making the connections in the community. I was making the connections in the course. I was making getting those connections, getting those folks would help me answer the questions that I needed and would give me questions. They would also push back I guess with Okay. You wanna do this, but if you thought of this.

And so they were really pushing the way I was thinking about the setup for our instance for Canvas. It really made those connections for me and I was starting to see the connections between what a parents need what does students need? What does staff need? What do my teachers need? What does counselors need? What are the admins need? And so it was helping me make those connections with my instance that I was using. Well. And because of that, I was then able to start seeing the big picture. I was looking at because I always being a teacher, I thought I was looking at the admin from the teacher's point of view.

So I was not thinking, okay, how is this gonna affect the students? How is it gonna affect staff, how's it going to affect the the, the observers? How how is that going to affect them? And so I was kinda looking through a lens as I was going through that the pro to start out with. But once I got into the program, and I started reading the the research and answering, asking those questions, and it really had me start thinking about, okay, What do I want our instance of Canvas to look like? How is it not only gonna be more beneficial for the teachers, but how is it also gonna be more beneficial for the parents for the students. And so we that big picture, then it started to Everything started to kind of fall into place, and it it was kinda like that aha moment where I was like, oh, this makes sense now. All the little things that everyone's been telling me that I've been hearing, everything's starting to fall into place. It's starting to make sense.

And it helped me to even though we had this was our fourth year of Canvas, We didn't really they didn't have an admin when they were when they purchased this canvas. So it was they didn't have time to think through the structure and what so it's I we started back at square one. And I started building that foundation. Okay. We're gonna change this.

We need to change this. And luckily, the director of curriculum, my supervisor said, okay. If that's what you think, then we'll change it. And so I they were Oh, I read I would tell them I read this. She said, okay.

That's fine. Go ahead and make that change. And so talking to them, talking to the SIS, talking to the other, teams. This the synergy are clever, we started making those changes. We went we started going back.

I spent three or four months reorganizing our account, taking all the archive courses and high because we had in four years, we had ten thousand courses in our high school course. It was a pain in the rear trying to find courses that I was looking for. And so because I had time and this is I would mean I said I'm learning this in the c CTA, we need to change the structure. Okay. Change the structure.

Just let us know how we need to change it. So Building we had that foundation that we're moving forward. We now have a plan of what we're doing. And so that helped. And so those are kind of things that that really resonated with me.

So then what we did was we started building our Canvas admin plan. We didn't have one of these when I started. We didn't have a plan of what does our Canvas instance look like? And so what I had, we had so we have it's now to like thirty five, forty pages. But it houses everything that is makes our Canvas instance what it is. It's got all the directions.

So if at some point, I move on, then whoever's there, I can hand them to them, and they have the answers. And so my first part was just organizing the account. And I went through When I was going through the course, I went through, and I organized our accounts, how do we manage courses. We went through users and permissions. Any document that I use is linked in that plan.

So any spreadsheet that I use, any, I went through and created my own Google sheet of every admin that I have for each school, and I have marked what permissions they have, and I know who's what admin at what account level and it's all linked in that admin plan. So I can go in and at any time I can If I need to change a permission, for example, the account calendars that just came out I went in and updated permissions because it's there. And so everything that I have is in this admin plan. Part two was my set as where the settings and the tools, analytics, and reporting, the shared resources, and support and training. So anything that I have, any document, and I think I'm more than welcome the end, I'll give you my email address.

I'll be more than welcome to share my plan with you and you're welcome to look at it. But I'll give you my email here at the very end. But this made Like I said, it has everything, any LTI that we use. I have directions in there. The directions that I went through to create to archive my course It took me a while to figure it out, but I wrote all the steps in there so that if somebody else come in, they don't have to start over again.

It's there for them. It and it's got documents, it shows them what they need to do. So that is the admin, the admin plan. To me, That's what the CCTA program helped me do. It helped me organize everything into this one document.

And I have it I have it pinned at the top, so it's up every day. My plan is to update it at the end of each semester. I go back and look at it if there's something changed, I'll go into it and I'll make a note, a comment that I need to re look at this at the end of the semester because I usually don't have to make those changes now, but I'll go back in and I'll make those changes at the end of the semester. The so a little bit about the CCTA program, just so you kinda know the structure. So there are two courses, Core one, which was part one of the admin plan.

Core two, which is part two of the admin plan. It walks you through all of the steps. Okay? All of the assignments All part one is the, whatever the first part was organization, I think. Then it was managing courses. Each one of the modules walks you through each one of those steps.

And it takes you all of the assignments that you you build are things that you will add to your your admin plan. It help they help you build that they give you a template for your admin plan so that you can start filling things in and linking things in. Of course, I took their template and modified it a little bit. So it worked for for our district, But it's all there for me. And that core one and core two walk you through that admin plan.

And then the you there's two electives using the Canvas API? I had no clue. I heard the Canvas the word API before. But I never used it. I took the first course, Canvas API. Oh my gosh.

My head hurt. I can't tell you how many times I would have to there was times I would spend an hour, two hours working on something, and I would get so frustrated. I'd have to get up, and I'd have to take a walk around the school. Or I'd have to go do something else, come back, and then I look at it, like, crap. It was that one period.

Or I would send and use those connections, I would send that to one of the others in the course and they would take a look at it for me they would notice you've got an extra space here at the end. Or you you missed the semicolon here. And so that even though it hurt in my head. That was really beneficial because now I feel more comfortable using API. Now, I still need to spend more time, and there are more things that I want it to do.

But it gave me the basis. At least I know what it is. I know how to start using it. And I've made those connections with others that have used it all the time. And they can answer my questions for me.

And I always use the beta to test it first. I haven't done anything in I'm not that brave yet, but I'm working on it. And then your second choice is leading with Canvas for technical admin. That kind of is helps you build that communication between you and your staff and the parents and the community. How are you going if you haven't adopted, how are you gonna get it that out there? What are you gonna do to promote it? What are you gonna do to, provide training? What is gonna look like, but that helps you, and I took all of that because I took something similar in the CCE program, and I added it to my Canvas admin So that helps me with the courses.

The courses are synchronous. So you have they last six weeks. There's four modules that you work through, and then you have an extra two weeks. To either get caught up, like I usually had to, or you have two weeks to work on your final assignment, which in core one is the first part of your account admin plan and core two is your Canvas settings and management. So those final assignments helps you build that Canvas admin plan.

So it's not something that you're not going to use. The assignments aren't going You can reuse the assignments that you've already created. Just add them into your admin plan. Each is they're facilitated. You have a facilitator that's gonna be there and answer questions for I'm one of the facilitators, so I answer the questions.

Emails, I've even got on Zoom, and I've walked folks through things. So we're there, to help walk you through those programs. And let's see. So the weekly modules, they include a you have some resources that are provided that you get to work through. You get to look at the resources.

Think about the resources. They had given you key questions to think about. Then you have, a an assignment where you're starting to build your canvas admin plan And then you have a discussion at the end where you share part of your admin plan. And you, which is awesome because then I got to see folks admin planes from other districts, larger districts, smaller districts. I'm like, oh, I wanna add that in mine.

That makes more sense. And so I would change mine, and then we have those discussions in that course. Each, like I said, there are three courses. Each one's sixteen or not sixteen. Each one's six weeks long.

And takes eighteen weeks to become a certified admin. The core courses are about ten hours each one. So if you can carve out ten hours in in six weeks, I know sometimes I was I would go to school early, just so I could get a little bit done before the chaos of the day. My son's twenty two, so he's leaving me I just say, leave me alone. I got stuff to do.

And so he would I mean, he's in college. So if I could find those times, and it wasn't it's not a huge commitment. And to me, it was worth it. All those times that I got to spend really thinking about the program, and then the electives, they're estimating about seven hours. I know Chrisle vouch with me up here.

The API took us a lot longer than that. Like fifty hours. But That's only because API is hard work. And it but it was it was to me, it was worth it. It really made me think about things I could do with the API, the things I wanna try.

And there are due dates, on the assignments. But, what was that? Somebody, it's more like a suggestion. Just to help you stay on track. As long as everything is done by the end of the course, that's great. But the the best thing to me is, for the program, is it's not something I took and then I'm not gonna It's something I took, and I'm still using every day.

It's my admin plan is something I go back and I look that, and I update, and I share it. And I'm making changes to it. Like I said, the API. Of course, I'm going in and I'm using that as well. I'll get back into it.

We started school today. So I'm back into that back to school mode. So I'll get back to that here in just a couple a few days. So these are some kind of comments on the some of the final assignments that Some of the folks in my courses and in the other courses have said, this one right here, this has been an exhausting but the same time, refreshing activity sounds strange, but that's how it feels and that was from a participant in one of my API in my API course. The content is just thinking that initial question to more in-depth exploration of our own practices and the graphite or like I said, it just really when I got into this program, it really started helping me to make sense of my instance.

And even folks that have been in the course for they've had Canvas for multiple years. Some of these are from them that have been in head Canvas for six, seven, eight years. It's still they might be new and they adopted before they got there, but it helped them to really go back in and ask questions Maybe they're not changing everything, but at least they can they know what questions to ask, okay, eight years ago when we adopted Canvas. Why did we do it this way? And so they can they know the questions to ask to help everything to make sense to them. And it's like this said, like many of colleagues, I've never investigated these options and that was that was me.

I didn't I knew that the permissions were there. I knew that the settings were there. I knew that the analytics were there, but I just didn't have time. And so this, these courses really helped me dig into those settings dig into the back end and it made sense to me now. It makes sense to me.

And so I know the questions, I know where to go find my resources if I don't understand, but I know that it's there and it's making sense for me. And like in this. So if you wanna know more, if you're interested in the program, there are some links. And like I said, I think you guys will have access to other presentations? If not, I'll show you my there's introducing the surface technical admin had become certified technical admin. And then there's the the email.

If you wanna get more information, You can send them an email and say you're interested. And then you can click there and that's a form that you can fill out to have information sent to you. And you're welcome to send me an email, which that's me on Twitter. All techie things. Are my teaching and learning team.

They changed my Twitter handle to that, because it They didn't like what I had, and that was me. And then that's my email. You're welcome to send me an email. You're welcome to, ask questions. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have.

I know that we're about six minutes early. But I will stick around if anybody has any questions. Otherwise, I think that's everything. Yes.