A Decade with Canvas LMS: Lessons Learned

Alright. We got the thumbs the door is closing. Hello. Welcome. Thanks for joining us in the afternoon here as people are starting to fade away. We appreciate, having so many people for, little, hopefully, some time for some discussion with each other, and then some questions with us at And, we'll somewhat apologize in advance because this is our story and our journey, and it's only forty five minutes.

It's it's gonna be more of us talking than we generally would like for first and PD, but, we'll do our best to put some breaks in there and certainly we're always available to answer questions and and catch up later as well. So this is a decade with Canvas lessons learned. I'm gonna start with some introductions. I'm Cara, Osmonson. And I'm Eric Hills.

We are blended learning coordinators. This is our title. We're from Shaquepi, Minnesota, which is, South of Minneapolis. And we are, teachers. K twelve.

We both have a secondary background. We support our teachers across the district. We use canvas for grades six, twelve. Everyone uses canvas for grades six, twelve. We Canvas Gradebook, all of that.

Everything that we, do and let there's one thing in our presentation that we pay for outside of Canvas. Or, you know, partner. But we really like to emphasize that everything we're talking about is something if you use Canvas, it's accessible to you. Right? That's important to us. We have ten thousand kids.

Eight thousand. Eight thousand. Eight thousand kids in Shopify, to give you a sense of the size of the district we work with about six hundred teachers. So if anyone wants to talk about those parameters, we had some people in the last session, feel free to check-in with us about that and your experiences. How many of you are here for round two with us? We were just in the room.

Okay. We didn't scare you off. Thank you for sticking around. So what, Kara mentioned is we're going to talk about really our journey in adopting Canvas as the session implies. We have had Canvas for ten years now.

And so we're gonna go through our journey into the Canvas first, if you will here. So what we did back in twenty thirteen is we knew that we would be rolling out devices for our students in a one to one setting. We knew that was on the horizon. And so our tech director wisely said, Hey, we should probably get an LMS. We have a way of delivering content to students, once they have those devices in their hands.

And so From there, we we kind of I could go through the details, but I won't. We rolled up devices starting at kindergarten and sixth grade. And then they kinda periodically rolled up each year by the time between twenty fourteen and twenty seventeen. We had fully adopted IPads, k through eight. And then, we rolled out Mac books to our high school.

Between the years of, twenty fifteen and twenty seventeen. Our ninth graders got them first, which made all the seniors mad. Right? So by the time we got to the end, or I should say fall of twenty seventeen, we were fully one to one, kind of across the board. And the kind of the catalyst for our most successful piece of adoption. Like if you're if you're looking for that silver bullet, like how do we actually get our teachers using Canvas? I have the answer, but many of you may not be able to implement this you're not one of the, you know, decision makers.

Right? But our gold our silver bullet, not golden bullet, silver. I said that. Was that we adopted Canvas as our official grade book for all students six through twelve. And what that means is All grading data is stored in Candace. At the end of the quarter, each teacher goes into our our student information system and inputs a letter grade, and that's all they do on the on the SIS side.

Okay? And we found that to be incredibly, helpful in communication and all the other things that we're gonna talk about today. But also really drove, oh, we need music too, apparently. They're showing. And that really helped drive a lot of our adoption and then we were able to do some of the things that we'll talk about today. So it's like, yeah, we had Canvas back here.

But we really we're we're, you know, obviously we're still learning and we're still developing. We we took missteps We also have some things that we think are good ideas to get ahead of. Okay. So rule number one and none of you are here anymore. Get an LMS before devices.

Sorry. Can't go back in time. No time machines here. There's a delorean out there. So here's what our what we're going to go through with this session today is we are going to talk about setting clear expectations with staff.

We're gonna talk about consistent course design transparency and communication, parent access, if that's something you want. Clear channels for support, and that's for you know, kind of a technical support, ongoing professional development. And then we'll take some questions at the end. One other thing I'll mention is we will have these slides for you. Oh, that was not good.

We will provide these slides to you, free of charge. At the end of our session, I can't find a spot for that. So you don't necessarily need to write this all down, or take pictures, but feel free to do so if you would like. Okay. So clear expectations is our first topic here.

And, the first thing that we didn't do. Okay. This is a oops on our part is that we didn't really identify who is going to be using Canvas. We said, Hey, Let's get an LMS because somebody told us we should get one and we're gonna roll out devices, you know, periodically up through our grade levels. There was a lot of groups that said, oh, we don't really have to use Canvas.

We're exempt. Sped department. And and it turns out that we needed to have more clear guidelines, more clear vision around What does it look like in a special ed classroom compared to what does it look like in a social studies classroom or a science classroom? Okay. Because it looks different, but we need to make sure that all students know how to use the platform, have consistency across all their courses, all that. So That was something we really needed to identify.

You'll also hear me. We we were looking at that timeline. Our our k through five grades do not use Canvas. They're not required to use Canvas. We have some teachers dabbling.

We have the licenses available for them. We have some teachers that swear by it. We have some supplemental resources like kids that opt out of sex ed get a unit that gets delivered via Canvas. But we have not yet really taken the plunge on our elementary folks. Most of that is because of the wonderful tool called seesaw.

Really great, but it's kinda hampered our our Canvas adoption. Another thing we did is, we worked with committee of teachers to determine what a good course looks like. What is consistent, across the school? And then really what we did is to say, Hey, this school did a great job with this tech committee. And we applied that, six through twelve with some minor tweaks for our high school. So that might be something you wanna consider as getting that teacher input in what does a good course look like? What are you gonna be tight on? What are you gonna be loose on? That kind of thing? And determine a rollout plan or reboot if you're like, Hey, we're a decade in and we need to do some of the things that we'll talk about today.

Maybe you gotta reboot Start with your instructors, of course. How are you going to roll that out, whether by grade level? How are you going to train them? How are you gonna train new staff? All those fun things to consider. How are you gonna get show your students how to use it? And how are you gonna get your observers in there as well? Lots of big questions to consider. Okay. And you have to have answers for those.

Right? Lastly, and this I mentioned that this was our silver bullet, right? Determine grading practices. Are you going to have mirrored grade books. And what I mean by that is do you have a student information system over here and canvas over here and you try to make them look the same. Don't do that. It's just painful, but we did that for a little bit.

Of course. Do you have a grade passback function? Are you able to sync your grades over from Canvas to PowerSchool or infinite campus or, you know, whatever it is. Or are you just gonna say, you know what? Let's stop dealing with all the glitches in these great passbacks and let's just use the Canvas gradebook. Again, That needs to be something that's ironed out because what we found is that some teachers did a mirrored grade book Some people had way more stuff in Canvas and way less stuff in their, in our SIS. And what does that lead to, of course? Confusion amongst parents and students.

So it's, you know, really clear expectations need to be set for grading practices. Sorry. That was a little long winded. That was a lot. We also just to reiterate, Although we are K-twelve th, you know, things happen differently in different institutions, we aren't district level decision makers or district level provide input to you leaders, teacher leaders.

So some of these things happened, differently in different buildings too. Right? We have one high school. We have two middle schools. And so depending on who the principal is, those kinds of things, the principal at the high school said, Hey, all the kids are gonna take a course about using a Mac they're all gonna take a course about how to use canvas. When our students come in to freshman seminar, they learn about, not just Canvas, because now they use that in middle school too, but, you know, we have some of those systems in place.

And so that that varies by building as well. But having a clearer vision, I would say, for those user groups. What's the vision for students using Canvas? So Consistent course design is kind of a big topic. These are all my pieces of my topic with more slides on on each of these pieces. But we have found this to be over the years to be really helpful and what that consistent design is has changed over time too.

We sometimes still see the template float up that somebody created one of our team members in twenty fourteen. Maybe. That's like It it just yeah. It it's like nineteen ninety three. Microsoft works to me.

It just gives me the heebies. But, know, we work on that. Those are and and Canvas has changed too. Canvas has allowed again watching some of the pieces this morning with the add a video widget, you know, like, oh, pages could be could be pretty nice, a little easier to work with. But we do use the template feature.

I saw somebody was offering a session to template or not to template. Did anybody go to that? So if you have any input from that for us, that'd be great. But we love it. So we we are using a course template We also will use commons if we have, teachers who wanna share resources or templates. We also have Do we have PLC courses in here somewhere later? Sorry.

We also have our course groups, so like US history or world history, they have a shared course that they can work in and then pull content into their individual courses. We do have a variety of ways to have some of that consistency, but, we do use the course template. We have consistency on our homepage. We want all of our teachers to be using modules as their launch point for students. We want certain navigation buttons available and others hidden so that students aren't confused by the teacher who has imported content twelve different times and has twelve versions of the same quiz with the same name.

And if kids click on the quiz button, they have no clue where to go. Right? That never happens. That happens. Right? So we we want those things to be consistent. We recommend course settings for students and Did you move this to this page, or do we have it on two pages? Admin, admin analytics.

New this year. One of the great uses of admin analytics is to look at like feature use. And so we can drill down and say, oh, look at these three science teachers over here who are not using modules. Let's look at their courses and have a conversation with them. So good ways to get some of that data as well.

Alright. So that course template, it is something that, a canvas admin. Can do. You can create a course, and then you click off in the settings that it is a course template. You enable it as a template.

It has all the settings that you'd like to see in your instance. Some things do not stick. So at the bottom here, late policy, assignment groups. Theoretically, I believe all of our teachers are supposed to have formative and summative, assignment groups, categories, and we can't create that for them and push it out in a template. So we have a template, and then we have a set of here are the things you need to do.

Boom. Boom. Boom. When you are, done changing the name, you know, changing the content on your homepage, those things. You can assign a course template to a subaccount or to your entire domain.

So we do not have all of our courses in Canvas that are created, with the template, just our secondary courses. So if an elementary teacher is using Canvas, we don't want them to have the secondary template. Did I miss anything there? Alright. So This is Mather. What? This is me.

Oh, this is Eric. And we switch. Okay. So, again, Carl mentioned that course template feature, and that totally changed the game for us a couple of years ago because we were able to say, Hey, These are the things we're doing, not just like, hey, teachers, you gotta go learn how to set all these little things up. So one of the things that we decided was that we need to give teachers an opportunity to get creative with their homepage, but we also have to have some things that are the same.

And so we have the, you know, it's it's nothing special. That's our course homepage, our homepage template over there on the right. It's very clean. It's very simple. Has a banner across the top.

Has three links. Contact tech support. They click on that. Sends in a help desk ticket. Student canvas guides, take some of the community.

And then canvas for parents, which is our resource for parents to look at in order to figure out how to get signed up. So if they're peeking over their kid's shoulder at their canvas course, they can click on canvas for parents and create themselves an account. So that's really all it is. And then of course, we want them to just put some basic information about their course their contact information and a syllabus. If they, have a syllabus, they can just link it right there.

One other thing we included in our course template is we have different home pages if we have a snow day. Some of you are like, what's a snow day? Where we can't drive to work, So they they let us stay home, but then we, we post assignments to Canvas on those days. And, so kids, the teachers basically flip to a different homepage that day that has slightly different directions, and it has a nice little GIF of snow falling, and it's very nice and cute. Right? And I'm not showing it to you because we'll take too long to find it. So one teacher decided to personalize theirs just a little bit for their course app creations, had her lovely bitmoji in there as well.

So we we basically said anything below what we have, go for it. Add your buttons, that's fine. Add your links, giving them some opportunity to be creative. Let's see some take picture taking here. Here it is.

It's beautiful. It's not. It's very simple. We, in fact, we would like to redo it probably, but then you know, we'll have that problem of in five years, somebody will pop up with this template that we used, you know, in the past. And then, yeah.

Go back for a second. Yeah. It's also gone back and forth over time, right? So we used to have something more complicated, and then we had something really simple, and then we, you know, fluxed a little bit. But we've stuck with this for quite a few years, essentially. We talked about adding in a little opportunities for turn and talk, and I thought this was a place you wanted to.

Do it. Do it. We we hate talking the whole time, so we were thought This might be a good opportunity just to talk to a neighbor about homepage's templates. Is that something that you have strong feelings about, or ideas about, or we missing something? So if we just take about ninety seconds to think in your head and talk to a neighbor, shout something out to us is fine, but just a little a little mental break here. So we'll take ninety seconds.

Making friends. Okay. Thank you. That was ninety seconds. I did not plug in a speaker, so I'm sorry.

I don't have any pretty music. Am I next? Alright. Please know that if you come up with anything very wise, we would love to hear it. Alright? This is a this is definitely a two way street. There's a lot of, too many people to have a just a conversation conversation, but we if there's something you wanna tell us that we're missing, we would love to hear it.

Modules. So when we talk about consistency, we really want teachers to put everything in modules. And I mentioned one reason earlier, the confusion factor. On the right, we have a a screenshot from a teacher course. During, pandemic, during, we had We had a, b days, right, where students went in and stayed home, and a variety of different things going on.

And, this was one of the strategies that teachers used to keep track of things. We will frequently see, the unit is, you know, world war one, but then things are organized kind of chronologically with dates on them for students to see. It it does require something if you're putting your dates in headers, but A lot of our teachers have been using, emoji icons, colors, things, and headers to try to help students to have no question about where to find their information. There's always a question, but it helps. So, some of our suggestions moving most recent modules to the top, breaking topics down by week rather than topic, really It's not where I thought we would go.

But it's been really helpful, and many teachers are doing that. I said organize chronologically, which I think makes good sense, unpublished old modules if you don't need them. And we also, encourage teachers in certain settings, not everyone's into this, but to use the module requirements. Even if you aren't limiting, like, must do this. Right? Even if you aren't saying you need to pass your quiz before you can get your next assignment, students like, if you haven't seen it, students like how there's a green check mark when they've actually finished something.

And it makes it easy for them to be able to go back into that module and they can see yes. Okay. As it's Thursday, July twenty seventh. But they can quickly see those little checks say, oh, yeah. I needed to finish this assignment.

And we are in a unique position where we get to hear from parents. We get to hear from students. We hear different things that teachers in the classroom might not hear. And some of those things might be, yes, it's a little extra work. It's a little something else that a teacher needs to do.

But anytime we hear from students, this is what helps us to make sense of something. This is what helps us to be successful. We, want to share that with our teachers. And that is that's one we've heard pretty loud and clear from high school students in particular, but they like to see those check marks. Alright.

Let's get controversial. All the courses that we see throughout InstructureCon, whether it be during a demo, or just in in as people are showing their courses. One of the things that I notice, like the first thing I notice when I look at a course is what navigation buttons do they have available for students? And, this is where, like, people want to fight with us about should assignments be available for students to click on or not? And we we have a definitive answer, but it may not be right for everyone. Okay. So we're on the use modules side of the fence.

And we like to minimize the number of options as much as we can. Those are the four that are in our template, and that's it. Okay. And so the nice pieces about that is you know, if you complete a unit, you're done with it and it's, you know, weeks old at that point, you can unpublish that module Students don't see it anymore. Bye bye.

It's gone. Okay. Still in the grade book. They can still see how they did on those assignments, but you've moved on. And then you kind of, you know, relieve that scroll of death as they go down their modules page.

You know, we don't need every single thing visible. Especially if you have a course that lasts an entire year like some of our our teachers do. Have you guys seen that new feature where you can publish or unpublish like all the stuff in a module? That's like, oh, that's gonna be awesome. Let's see. Yeah.

I think we covered all that. So hide hiding some of those things like assignments, quizzes, and discussions help students know where to go. Because you can just have them in a module and have them in the order that makes sense as opposed to clicking on assignments and then seeing everything in order of due date, for example, which doesn't always give you a good priority list. Alright. Anyone wanna fight me on that? No.

No. Cara, you're up? I was, as I was looking at that, with some fresh eyes too. We, have announcements in our template. Our teachers got released using announcements in twenty twenty. Twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two.

Some of them had a little backlash to it, but there are many teachers who, continue to use announcements, just the reminders, Hey, this is due tomorrow. You know, Hey, here were the learning targets today. It's kind of, a way to show what was on the board that day. Right? So as a student, you get home and Kids do take pictures of the board. Like, I've seen people taking pictures of slides.

Right? Kids do that too. But, and I actually, I know a couple of teachers who pictures of their board just in their announcements. So just those reminders just to take home with kids. I primarily worked at the middle schools and a lot of our teachers to do just one announcement per week. So it's kind of a preview of the week as opposed to, you know, getting a email notification every time an announcement comes through.

So some some teachers like doing that, we haven't been tight on the use of announcements, but we've been saying, Hey, here's the button. It's there. And so you can use it. And then we encourage that, to be the method of communication for an entire class because It goes out to parents, it goes out to the kids, all that. We were tight during the pandemic.

We also have our templates set up. So those that, announcements show on the top of the page, for the students to, have their MacBooks. Yeah. It's on. Is my mouth not close enough to it? I'm so sorry.

Sure. My sister teachers, at a university, and she only she only uses modules too because she likes how that works for kids. But absolutely, especially if you didn't design the course or if you're sharing, you know, depending on how much control you have. And she's at a d three school and she creates her own course. So that makes a difference too.

I'm sure. Thank you. Oh, what I just said. So we show the most recent iments on the top of the home page. We, have some things that we've turned off, and this might be a k twelve thing that if you don't do it, you might wanna know.

Disabling comments and announcements. We even had high school students today. Can we, you know, can we use this comments feature, but what happened, at our middle school level is that it doesn't go away. It's like a text thread out there in the cloud that kids can continue to use and abuse. Over time.

And so that's turned off at the district level. No comments and announcements. So these are the settings we have. And then this is the one thing that we pay for that for us has been, a life changing, but pretty big, especially, especially at the high school level. But we do use dropout detective, grade guardian.

And there was a session on that two hours ago. The minerals were here. It helps us to have that transparency and communication. At at the high school, we are we have academies, we have six academies. We have a big high school with academies.

And so teachers are in these academy teams. So I might be engineering and manufacturing, and Eric might be arts and calm, and we wanna be able to talk about the kids in our academy. And so we've set up, a course. Every kid is in an academy course, and then the sections are by grade. So you're in freshman academy, or you're in arts and comped, you know, ten, eleven, or twelve.

And then we can pull all that data in a spreadsheet. And break it down by grade level by academy. And there is a data guy now who manipulates that more than we do, but it's been really, really useful. It also gives you this stoplight look at student progress And one of the things that we use a lot, especially at the high school level is the notes option. So a teacher can attach a note, or the team can attach a note and say, Hey, we talked about these are this is fake data.

Hey, we talked about Hannah. And, connected with her mom, blah blah blah. Right? Or I'm the sped teacher. I can link the IEP here so people can see it. So You can use tags so you could sort your class for the tags that have, sped, you know, or an IEP is attached, those kinds of things.

So I'm not gonna give a bigger if you wanna talk to us about it. That that's great, but it really has helped us with transparency and with communication. Outside of having that individual classroom that kind of traditional secondary approach to teaching. We, in order to do this, have given all teachers some admin rights. So teachers can go into other courses.

So if I go and click on Hannah Richardson, I can see her schedule. I see her four classes. Wanna see how she's doing in Hills class. Why does she have a d? I can click in there and I can have, hey, Hannah. I see you have Hills for geography and you're missing these three assignments.

Let's have a conversation about that. So it just opens up a lot of opportunities. And I do think it has helped with teacher being teachers being able to see each other's courses. It breaks down some of those Some of the fears, and some of the worries as well to be able to to dip in and just see what does it look like in someone else's class. And I we haven't heard any major downsides of that.

So hopefully hopefully there aren't. Also, we will use, global announcements within subaccounts. So we can send, unrelated to Greg Guardian. We can send, out an announcement to everyone at the high school. Right? All students are all students and observers, all teachers, whatnot.

So we do that with our students a lot. We use global announcements. And our clubs and activities, almost all have Canvas courses our students request it. So when someone is a new coach or a new advisor, they'll be like, Hey, you know, I had my first meeting and all the kids want a Canvas course. I guess, that's how they like their announcements.

And we're like, so, we create courses for those and the teachers are using announcements. So Kids are getting that information in some consistent ways. We are manually creating those right now. Yeah. We, they were there a few years ago.

I think we decided we didn't want. We we don't keep up on the enrollment of some of those. So they they aren't as dynamic as would be accurate. Yeah. We create dashboards in great guardian for those, clubs and things too.

And right now, we're doing that manually as well. Yep. Alright. Another topic that we could use some improvement on, or maybe we didn't do it quite the way we would have liked. When Canvas is, again, their enrollment process for getting parents into Canvas has changed quite a bit over the years.

And they have the new mobile app that's been out for, I don't know, four years probably now. That continues to evolve as well. They kind of linked up how those accounts work. So you create an account in the parent app. It now works on the website.

It used to not. Which was made everything just a little bit more confusing for us. But this is something that, you know, if you're if you're new to canvas, We you really gotta be considering how are you going to get your parents enrolled? And the ways that we've really driven enrollment, I'm gonna bring up a a totally different platform. I mentioned seesaw. Does anyone know what seesaw is or use it? Okay.

Probably some parents in the room too. Right? What we did we have like a ninety seven percent parent enrollment rate in seesaw. And we're like, how we don't even know how we did And it turns out it has a pretty good number compared to some of the other districts around us. And the secret is the teachers getting the parents in. It's not getting the admin to create a SIS like CSV and uploading it somewhere because those accounts just don't always get used.

When a teacher reaches out to a parent says, hey, your student is struggling in x y z and they go, how can I find more information about how my student is doing? That's the hook. They want in. Okay? And so what advisors can do or any teacher can do. If you have a course open right now, you can do this. You click on people.

There's three dots in the upper right hand corner. You can generate pairing codes for every kid in your class right now. It creates a spreadsheet and then it says, hey, it expires in a week. You can send that pairing code to one of your parents and they're able to connect and pair with their student, and they can use that. It's really easy to do it in the mobile app.

The parts that I I still think we need to do a little more outreach and improvement on is that the parent app is is simple. It's great. It's it's a snapshot. It says Here's what you've got for grades, in your classes. Here's some things that are missing.

But that's kinda it. Shows you what's coming up a little bit. You log in to the web, you really see what a kid sees. It's like the full experience of what a student would see when they log in. Parents don't know that intuitively.

They go, oh, well, I wanna use my app. Right? I wanna just click on an app and bam I'm in. Okay? And that's understandable. So training parents on how are those two things a little bit different? Hey, you wanna use your phone? Great. Maybe you wanna use the web browser if you want this.

If you just want this data, you know, give them give them all the information to make the right choice. Okay? We also we did try automating the creation of parent accounts. Has anyone done that successfully, perhaps? We're gonna talk. We're gonna talk after. Okay? So we oh, darn.

We need we need somebody's email address. Yeah. We tried doing it and it literally like broke everyone's account. So, yeah, that was a major fail on our part. But definitely a question that needs to be considered.

A rollout plan needs to be in place. And the part that also is missing is our admin right now, they're like, yeah, we need more parents in there, but we don't have a summer training with parents or we don't have, enough staff to enroll them at, open house. For example. Those things need to be done, but also, at our middle school level, in particular, every student has an adviser They have, you know, fifteen to twenty kids that they're the adviser of. If they just reach out to those fifteen kids, you can get a lot more people enrolled.

Than if you, you know, try to automate the process, there needs to be a need for parents to be in there for them to want to be in there. Right? And putting our grades into canvas, has been a motivator, but it's a work, it's a work in progress. What else is I thinking there? We trained our, front office folks to know how to generate a pairing code. So if they get questions from parents, they can do that. We we mentioned this, but like with the academies, I can very easily generate.

Here's engineering and manufacturing academy. Here's a pairing code for every student in that academy. So at an open house, they can look up a student and give a parent a pairing code. So we try to support provide opportunities to support those things. Okay.

Other lessons learned, making sure we have clear halves for support. We do have a our our tech department has a an an email parent help at choppy dot k twelve dot m a dot u s. That parents can use and go straight to tech. So we put that link into our courses for students to be able to use to generate a help ticket if they need help. So we try to set up the easiest, best, clearest ways we can do that.

We have a button in our Canvas instance in Yeah. In the help menu, in the navigation menu. This is helpful. Right? And it it will open up So open up a help desk ticket. Yeah.

We have a website that we've, that we maintain that has a lot of this information generally targeted for teachers, but, trying to find ways to have that out there and have it be consistent. Find ways to get your tech staff, tech integrations, tech integrationists, and teacher coaches all into Canvas so that they understand it. We were doing a pretty good job there. It it ebbs and flows based on what our teaching and learning department is working on. We're technically in the technology department, but we work pretty closely with them.

We are able to one place we do have a good footing is with, new staff in Shopify, we have about seventy to ninety new staff every year, growth and turnover. And so we work with them. We have a new teacher week. They have four days. So we work with them.

We have that you're gonna talk about on the next slide, so I won't mention that. But, really trying to build those relationships with new staff and and checking in that is fortunately something we can work on. I mentioned admin analytics earlier. Did you have something else with admin analytics? Do you wanna mention? Okay. We just wanna make sure it was in there so we put it in there twice.

They mentioned it during the keynote, and I was like, oh yeah. That's a really good time. I'm gonna add it five times. If we aren't using a feature, we want teachers to use. We can now identify that using admin analytics.

So another thing that that you're always going to have a need for is ongoing professional development. Whether that be about learning how to use canvas or simply how do you deliver some professional development because your teachers need their CU hours and that kind of thing. So the first thing that I'd I'd highly recommend is creating just a module, a go to module that says, here's kind of the basics. This is gonna get you up and running because randomly we'll have people say, Hey, I'm I'm I've been around for five years. I just need a refresher on on kind of the core concepts.

Okay. So, you know, we we recommend having something because you're always gonna have a need for that. We called it our Canvas launch course, and it was really just one module with the basics. The what is module? What is your homepage? What other, how do you use the rich content editor? Just some basic things like that. We also created one course, which is a little, you know, people are doing it in different ways.

We created one course and put a number of modules in there. That are your continuing education credits. So a teacher can go in. They can click on a module that they want to take. And they'll get like an hour CEU certificate when they complete it.

And so it's it's kinda up to them if they want to do that, but it's been a great way for us to meet some of those specific licensure needs that we have or re licensure. And so teachers are going in there and and completing those And then it's it's kind of hands off for us. Everything is, self paced through a module, and then they they get a certificate at the end. They submit to our CU committee people. I don't need to go into that.

We also use Badger, which is kind of being pulled into Canvas credentials. Badger still works though. So I've been using that still. And Badger essentially lets me see who is doing what modules, which modules are popular and which modules haven't been touched in years. And we probably get rid of them or update them.

Right? Lastly, and this has been a huge success. Somehow, some way, somebody convinced our teaching and learning department to allow us thirty whole minutes to train staff on technology. Every year, Yeah. It it took years of fighting for that thirty minutes. Let me tell you.

But we had we had about five hundred staff members completed. The very first time we did it incredibly successful. And a lot of teachers gave us great feedback that this is something I need every year. And then I kinda, you know, second semester when I gotta set my courses up again. It was nice to have that as well.

So have an example over here. It's our elementary back to school tech module. With some introductions, how they get tech support just reiterating like, yes, you should use the help desk ticket. Please do not call me. And then how do you set up seesaw or Canvas or whatever it is? Here's some some tools we think are incredibly essential to your every day.

Here's some updates that have come down We've got a bunch of Canvas updates to highlight that I'm gonna be making lots of videos of in August about. But it's a great way to roll out you know, you've got tons of staff that are staying with you. And then you can you can update them on what's the latest and greatest, what's some new things and so that's been incredibly successful as well. Get admin buy in. That's all I can say.

If the admin are like, yep, the teachers want that and we'll give them the time to do that, then it'll get done. And then we can also say, Hey, these people didn't do that. So maybe you wanna go talk to them. Because we don't want to. Take that captive audience anytime you can, though.

Yeah. We got two minutes. Okay. So with that, we've got some resources for you. I'm gonna tell you what they are.

First one, link to the slides. Fairly obvious, right? Use them put them on Twitter, put them on threads, put them on myspace, whatever you use. Decade with Canvas, And, the other piece here is the course design, guidelines, which is kind of a checklist of items. Sorry. Did I steal your thunder.

Yeah. Oh, totally steal your thunder. We might slap them. And essentially what it is is a checklist to go through and check. Does your course you know, meet some of the guidelines that we suggest to our teachers, feel free to take that document, make a copy of it, reuse it, apply it to your own cool.

Make it better. I'll stop talking now. Caraustra. We worked together on this. I worked with an EL teacher and then we worked with some new teachers.

But it's kind of like a self assessment. Of your own course. So we kind of use it. Sorry. I turned that on when we had ninety second timer.

We kind of used it We use it with our new teachers. We use it in that sort of self assessment style. We'll say questions, because we're happy it has to stay here, but there's only one minute left. So I wanted to give you this, and I added one thing there. So let me put it back up again.

This is our, our email addresses, our Twitter for what that's worth right now. And then I I put our help site down there too, where we have some Canvas resources. And when Eric puts together his new videos, if you feel like, you know, stealing something from him, you can check it out. We're all about sharing, so happy to share, anytime and in any way that we can do that. So Yeah. Thanks for coming, everybody. Thank you.