4 Canvas Features that will Leave You Charmed
• Four of our lucky Canvas features
• Pro-tips for each feature
• Videos and other resources
Lora MIller, Dedicated Instructional Designer | Kern County Superintendent of Schools
Don Lourcey, Dedicated Instructional Designer | Houston Independent School District
In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, we’re highlighting four of our lucky Canvas features. These four features will leave you wanting to do an Irish jig. So grab your favorite beverage and join us on a journey through Canvas’ most charming features.
The New Quiz feature in Canvas is (sham)rockin’! When starting out with New Quizzes, you may find it beneficial to check out our New Quiz Readiness Checklist. This is a great resource to get you started.
Now, more on why New Quizzes are the bomb.com:
- More Question Types: The question-type options give teachers the opportunity to reach multiple levels of understanding within one quiz. Categorization, matching, hot spot, and ordering are a few of our favorite question types. Giving students the ability to show their knowledge in a variety of ways provides a clearer view of student understanding.
- Enhanced Security: New Quizzes provide better security measures to prevent your students from cheating. Being able to randomize question order, add time limits, and lock down your students’ browser helps to ensure that their work…is actually THEIR work.
- Better Accessibility: One of our favorite things about New Quizzes is that they are more accessible to all learners. Alternative text for images and the ability to use screen readers make New Quizzes easier to navigate with assistive technologies.
- Improved Feedback: New Quizzes offer teachers more ways to provide improved feedback. In New Quizzes, teachers can provide detailed feedback to students, including specific feedback for correct and incorrect answers and general feedback for the entire quiz.
You may have heard that Instructure was choosing to do away with Classic Quizzes altogether. While this was the plan, we heard educators’ concerns loud and clear and removed the deadline to switch to New Quizzes. Our goal is to facilitate a seamless transition to New Quizzes when customers are ready.
To learn more about Best Practices for Formative and Summative Assessments in Canvas, check out this blog post written by KC Testerman (@KCTesterman) and Payton Halinger (@Payton-Halinger).
Mastery Paths allow teachers to customize/personalize the student learning experience based on student performance or choice.
Every teacher would like to give all of their students just-in-time feedback and guided assistance, but many just do not have the time. Mastery Paths allow teachers to predetermine which resources and assessments to give students based on their skill level, which ensures that each student will have their needs met immediately.
The following learning experience will lead you to personalized learning gold at the end of the Mastery Paths rainbow. It unpacks use cases, how to get started, steps to building Mastery Paths, considerations for Mastery Paths, and best practices for implementing Mastery Paths.
We've created this fun Genial.ly for you to interact with to learn more about Mastery Paths! Click the image below to begin. Every slide is interactive so be sure to click on either the + or the icons.
This feature is a hidden gem, a game changer that will open up a treasure trove of access and readability, and comprehension for teachers and students. The Microsoft Immersive Reader can be used on any page or assignment, and the course syllabus.
To access, choose any content page or assignment and then click Immersive Reader (upper right-hand side). Currently, Discussions and Quizzes do not have this capability.
Click the audio button at the bottom and the Reader will begin reading the content. If a learner doesn’t like the default voice settings, they can click the voice settings to change the speed and the voice.
Here is a wealth of other features that will boost reading comprehension:
- Increase font size and line spacing.
- Change the theme color of the page.
- Click on individual words to hear the word sound and see a pictorial representation of the word.
- Turn on syllables.
- Show the parts of speech with specific colors and label each word based on its part of speech.
- Change the line focus to a single line, double line, or paragraph.
Watch this video demonstrating each feature (this video has no sound).
Important Note: In order to use this feature, it must be turned on at the Account and Course levels. System Admins may choose to turn the tool on for the entire Canvas instance or leave it as an opt-in feature for Teachers. In this case, Teachers will then need to turn it on at the course level by going to Settings > Feature Options > Microsoft Immersive Reader.
If a learner’s native language is not English, encourage him or her to translate the text. Check out how to do this in your Canvas course.
The final feature that makes us head-‘clover’-heels in love with Canvas is the ability to view the page history. 
Review Changes: Viewing the page history gives you the ability to review changes. If you want to see what changes have been made to a particular page over time, viewing the page history can be helpful. You can see who made changes to the page, what they changed, and when they made the changes.
Collaboration: If multiple people are working on a page, viewing the page history can help everyone to keep track of who has made changes and when the changes were made. This can help to avoid conflict when making changes to the same page.
Restoring Previous Versions: If you accidentally deleted or make significant changes to a page and you want to revert to a page version, viewing the page history can help identify the version you want to restore. You can then restore that version of the page and make the necessary edits.
Overall, using the view page history feature in Canvas can help you better understand changes made to a page over time and help you resolve any issues that may arise.
These features are Leprechaun-approved and packed with charm. Which ones are your favorites? Which ones leave you charmed? Do you have others you could share? In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, we want to leave you with this Irish limerick.
A Canvas course with engagement galore.
features to explore.
New Quizzes for assessment.
Immersive Reader, what a great present.
Page History to review and more.
Designing content, a creative art,
Each element plays its part.
Learning made fun with features second to none,
Canvas, the perfect place to start!
We’d love to hear about your favorite features in Canvas! Let us know why in the comments below!
Please comment below. We’d love to hear from you!
Our Instructional Design team offers templates, consultation, badging services, course evaluations, workshops, and more. If you would like to learn more about our services, please contact your CSM or @rosina_marie, Manager, Learning Services, via rmonteiro@instructure.com
