With recent world events turning K-12 schools and districts to online learning, we are excited to release a feature option that specifically aims to improve the experience of our youngest learners in Canvas—those in primary and elementary grade levels. The Canvas Elementary Theming feature option presents learners with a new look and feel including a newly introduced font and simplified course navigation.
The new font, Architect's Daughter, makes the Canvas course more inviting as it is casual and playful in nature. The font supports those learning to read and write as the letter formation is simple and friendly, with clear distinction of letters that are not easily confused with one another. Also, because the single-story a and g glyphs (as shown in the lowercase letters in the images below) are used in the font, which is consistent with the letter formation that is taught in the primary grade levels and is included in most early literacy programs.
This fun, new font is presented in the Global Navigation, Course Navigation, and Breadcrumbs Bar when the feature option is enabled for a course. It has also been added to the Rich Content Editor (RCE) as the default font for content creation. With the simplified Course Navigation, if a teacher has not previously customized the Course Navigation, it will automatically be simplified to show only four links for students - Home, Announcements, Grades, and Modules. If you have LTI tools enabled that should show in the Course Navigation, they will also show by default. It is important to note that students will not see Announcements or Modules as options in the Course Navigation if no content has been added to these index pages.
If you are teaching in a primary or elementary education setting, we hope you will give this new feature option a try. If you do not see it listed in your course options under settings, contact your district administrator to have it enabled for your account. We highly suggest that this option is set to allow to provide teachers the option of turning it on for their own individual courses as they see fit.
Also of note, this option will be enabled for all institutions in July 2020 as an account-level setting. Administrators will continue to manage the availability of the feature for teachers to manage within their own courses.
Have fun and keep learning!
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