In 2016 we ran a series of after school training sessions to show parents how to use Canvas. A comment that came up time and again was how can a parent easily switch the view from one child to the next in the website. This is not a new request and has come up in https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/2512-parental-observation-in-canvas-complicated-with-three-chi... and Parents Access to Canvas. The parent app has its flaws and until the greatest ones are ironed out, we won't be recommending its use.
To help parents, teaching assistants, learning support assistants and others may be observing more than one student at a time, here's a little bit of javascript you can add to your theme to make it easier to switch between students. If there are multiple observees, a drop down should appear to choose between students. This is what it looks like when completed.
To do this, the code picks up the observees of the current users and then a list of courses for these users. As Canvas calendars only deal with 10 courses by default, we wanted to limit the courses picked up. We did this by filtering for courses by certain terms that include the current year. Everyone should check lines 23-25:
if ( course.term &&
course.term.name.includes( (new Date()).getFullYear() )
)
Hope this helps
