Transcription
We're gonna review everything you need to know about Canvas LMS.
[Music] Hey guys, it's Lauren. Welcome back to my channel. I'm so excited to be starting a new playlist for teachers. I am creating an entire video series on everything you need to know about Canvas as an educator. In this video, I'm going to give you a basic tour of Canvas. We're going to get logged in and then I'm going to show you all the important features that you as the teacher need to know.
There have been a lot of updates with Canvas. So, I'm really excited to kick off this new series with you this summer. All right, I am on my Canvas login page here. This is my Canvas queen instance. Now, instance is a term that I want you to think is just canvas account because there are multiple Canvas instances. For example, each school district or institution has their own Canvas instance and you will have a account within that instance. Uh, so we have right here my Canvas Queen instance and then I also have open another instance which is the free for teachers version of Canvas. You can absolutely create an account if you don't have access to your school district Canvas account for you as a teacher. Even if you do have access to your school district account, I always think it's great to create a free for teachers account anyway cuz then you can create your own courses and have like a backup place to save all of your content. This is just a really great place to start as a as a new teacher. So, I'm going to log into both and we're going to go in between courses throughout this video.
But what I want you to see is the dashboard when you first log in. So, you've logged into Canvas. Now, what are you supposed to do, right? Well, I'm just going to give you in this video kind of like a basic tour of what everything is when you first log in. So, if you are logging into your institution's Canvas account, you might actually have on your dashboard some courses that appear. And these courses are favored by your school district. So if you're like, "Oh my gosh, I have courses and I didn't even create them." Your school district did that for you. So don't freak out about that. So here I actually have on my dashboard, I have favored these three courses. These are published. And then you'll notice on my other course, these are unpublished. So I can always come here and click published. But then when they're published, your students do have access to seeing them. So, if you're not ready to do that yet, just leave it unpublished right here below.
But let's go back to the free for teachers version. And so, we have the dashboard in the center here when we log in. And then on the left side here, we have this bar. This menu bar never goes away. It will always be there. Think of it as the quick menu access to certain things. So, you have your account, your dashboard, courses, calendar, inbox, history, commons, help. And you might be like, "Oh my gosh, that's a lot of stuff." In this video, we are just going to go over account, dashboard, courses. That's it. And I'm only going to go over the things that are honestly really important for you as a teacher. So, let's actually let's start from the top and work our way down for now. And again, I'm not going over calendar inboxes. I'm not going over any of that stuff today in this video because those each are going to get their own videos.
So, let's click on account first. This is where you have a bunch of different account settings. So, you can log out from here um by clicking your account, log out, and then you have access to all these things. Notifications, profile, files, settings, e portfolio, shared content, QR for mobile login, and global announcements. So, let's go to notifications first. And you will see here the notification settings. So basically, these are all the course activities and all the things that you could get notified about. So you can do it for the entire account. So that means across every single course or you can get really specific and select a course and then change up the notifications depending on that course. But I'm just going to do account here and you'll see that like for due dates maybe. So, and then you can hover over it and it'll tell you more details about it. So, assignment due dates may be changed. So, some of these, actually a lot of these are really geared towards students. So, getting your students to actually do this with you is a really great thing to do at the beginning of of the school year. But you can hover over it. Assignment due dates change. Do you want to be notified for that? If you do, how often do you want to be notified immediately, daily, weekly, or not at all? So, these are the options that you get to decide. and then you will receive a email about them. So I will probably turn the due date one off since I'm the teacher and I'm going to establish the change. I don't need to be notified about that. Announcements though. With announcements, these are new announcements in your course and whether maybe students are commenting on that announcement. If that's the case, I want to be notified immediately and so on. So as you can see, there's different options in here. You have discussions, conversations, scheduling, groups. There's all these different sections that you get to either turn off the notifications completely or turn them on depending upon how often you want to be notified. So, that's really pretty much it for notification settings.
Let's go to profile next. Profile can be limited depending upon your school district. Uh, but you can you should be able to edit some of the things. So, your name uh maybe you know you are going to put your pronouns in here, your title, you can write a little biography about yourself. This is great for like students who want to read more information about you and then maybe some important uh links. Maybe you have a teacher website you want to include here. You can do all of that right here.
I am not proud of what this looks like coming up next, but it is what it is. This is my free for teachers account. So I do not try to be that organized. There's a lot of files in here. And basically when you create a new course, you get a new file with all of the media that you put within that course. You have access to it through your account. You can upload, you can download, you can add folders. So think of this as like your content management space. You can click on these things, you can download, you can rename them. You can get really organized. On my other account, I am much neater and nicer within my files over here. I'm much more organized. I have folders for different things. It's really up to you. You can honestly, if you just wanted to like pay attention to your files in your course, that's kind of where I pay attention. And then this gets really nice and neat and organized later on.
Okay, we covered notifications, profile, files. We're going to skip settings e portfolio and we're going to go to shared content because we as teachers we love to share content with each other. So when someone shares something with you within your institution, this is where you will go to access it. So I shared with myself as an example a template module. So I have the ability to do some things with this. I can preview it. I can import it into a course or I can remove it completely if I don't want to use it. So, let's click preview for now. So, you can see I have this module here. I can look at every single page. Click next, preview it. And you know what? I do like it. I'm going to click the Xbox. And I'm back to my receive content page. I am going to import it into a course. Now, I can either click on here and scroll and find the course or I can just type in the title of the course and maybe it's this course and then click import to add the module into my course. That's just a really nice thing you can do. Or again to if you don't like it, you can remove it all together.
I am going to show you these last two, QR code and global announcement real quick. The QR code is a great option, especially if you have littleer kids that you're teaching. What this does is it makes it easier for them to access. So if they're, let's say, using an iPad in the class and they scan this QR code, they can get logged in much quicker using the QR code. this way. Global announcements are created either by your school or your school district and they come up on the dashboard. So, a lot of the times you'll get messages that appear basically where it says publish courses. It kind of like moves everything down and you'll get like a window of information that a lot of the time you just want to click out of. If for some reason it was really important and you exited out of it, you can always access the global announcements from your school, your school district from right here. And you'll see no announcements to display and that's because we're in the free for teachers version and I don't have an admin account involved with this course. So we have current and recent. So you basically can just go back and look at announcements that your school has sent everybody.
The next thing we're going to go over is the dashboard. We know this is the page that you're going to get access to immediately when you log in. There's a few things that we can do to customize this page that also your students can do. First off, if you don't like the order in which your courses are in, you can click and drag them to the appropriate order you want them in. You can also click the three dots on each course and you can rename them. So maybe I don't want it to be math period one. Maybe I just want it to be math. And then I can change the color. I can add a color if I want. So let's say I don't really like this blue. I have this eyeropper you can get in the Chrome store. And I like this color blue cuz it kind of matches better with my horse image here. And I'm going to paste that in. And now I have this really bright blue. I actually don't really like that. So I'm going to change it to this darker blue here. I think that that looks just a little bit better. But let's say we want the blue to consume this entire course. Yours probably has the color overlay already uh added like this, but you can get rid of it if you just want your pretty image by unselecting it from the three dots at the top here. So, we can change the nickname. We can change the color of the course card. We can move it. You can unfavor it. Let's say you're done with a course, like it's the end of the semester and you're starting a new semester. You can actually click this and unfavor the math course and it will disappear. It's not like gone forever. It's actually just in all courses here. It's just kind of a nice thing you can do if you're like done with a course and you're not using it and you only want a certain amount of courses here.
Let's take a quick look at everything on the right side of this page here. So, we have the to-do list. This for you as the teacher is essentially what you need to grade and how many. So, you'll notice this is I have one assignment that needs to be graded be graded. Uh, this is awesome when, let's say, you have a student turn in an assignment late and you get notified right here on your dashboard and you can click on it and it will take you immediately to the speed grader where you can grade it right here and you'll see it's just a little test assignment that's submitted. Really nice little shortcut feature that you as the teacher have. Um, other stuff to include is um some things on the calendar. So, if you're using the calendar, it'll tell you certain things that are coming up or for your students, it will actually tell them like assignments that are coming up that they need to submit. And then we have these options down here for start a new course or view grades. So, viewing grades, this will show your students all of their grades. So, I don't have any grades because I'm a teacher in Canvas here and so it says no grades. No grades. I have actually um one class where I am a student and I do have a percentage score, but this is just a great shortcut for students that you can show them where they can look at all of their Canvas grades. And then the other thing that you can do, which I suggest you do, is start a new course. And we'll go over that in just a little bit. Creating your sandbox workroom course.
So, one thing I did not mention is that if you don't like these course cards, you actually have the ability to change the dashboard view from card to list or recent activity. So, the list view looks like this. This is better for students because it will list all of the to-do items within all of their courses. It kind of acts as like an agenda. I think for teachers, the best dashboard view is the card view. I'll show you recent activity. So, this just kind of shows like what's recently been going on with all of the different courses. Again, probably a little bit better for students and for teachers, but honestly, the card view, it's the best view in my opinion. Now, you can argue in the comments below later. Come back here and argue if you like the other uh dashboard viewing pages better.
Next, on the global navigation bar, we are going to go to courses. And you'll see when I click it, we have the option to go to all courses or we have these shortcuts for our published courses or unpublished courses, which you can see I don't have them right now, but I'm going to click courses and we're going to go to all of the courses. And you'll see here I have a lot of courses and you probably will too one day if uh you're just starting out. They're organized, too. So, we have the live courses up top. We have the past enrollments. And then potentially future enrollments at the bottom. You can, you know, organize them by favoring them. This is what I mean by favoring the courses. So if you star them, you favorite them and they appear on the dashboard. So I can actually, let's do courses basically by name. And then I will find the math course again. Here's math. And I'm going to star that course again. So it will reappear on the dashboard. You can also do it by nickname, by term, enrolled as, and published versus unpublished. So those are just the way you you can sort through them. But then also since there's no search bar here, what I like to do a lot is click command F and then we can type in math and then I can star the math. That's just like a shortcut uh that you can do.
Okay. So now what I'm going to do is we're going to create a course and we're going to this is the first thing that you should do when you are getting ready to get started with Canvas. So I'm going to create a course and we're going to title it sandbox course and then I'm going to do the year of 2024. Click create and I've created my first Sandbox course. You'll notice there's absolutely nothing in it. But in the next video, I'm going to show you how you should get started in filling in this course so you can be prepared for the school year.
Thank you guys so much for watching. I really hope that this video was helpful and that you have a better understanding of where things are within your Canvas account. Make sure you stay tuned for the next video that's coming out because I'm going to review all the things related to creating your sandbox course. And of course, if you're excited about this new video series, I would greatly appreciate a like and subscribe. Stick around for a while and enjoy the canvas journey. All right, guys. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.