Transcription
In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up a Sandbox course. Hey guys, it's Lauren, welcome back to my channel. I'm so excited to be starting this new series, Everything Teachers Need to Know About Canvas. In this video, I'm going to go over all the steps to setting up your sandbox course.
Now, if you haven't checked out the first video of this series where I give you a basic overview, a basic tour of Canvas LMS, you should go check that out. I have it linked in the description below for you. All right, let's get into this.
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Video. In the previous video of this series, I showed you how to create a sandbox course by going to Courses and All Courses. I'm going to show you just how to create a sandbox course if you just want to log in and get started. So all you have to do is click Start a New Course. And again, we're just going to click Manually Created Course. And we're going to give it the title of Sandbox Course and we'll do 2024 and Create.
Now, when we create this course, we are going to begin within the course settings. Now, we've created our sandbox course, which is great. So what is the purpose of a sandbox course in the first place? I want you to think of your sandbox course as your rough draft for when you transfer all of your course content, content from your sandbox into a live course with students. So basically, you get to create content in here and you don't have to worry about students accessing this. It's only you in this course.
So let's get into our course settings, our course details, and kind of getting started building content in our Canvas course. So you'll notice now I have a second menu. We have the global navigation bar. Now we have the course navigation bar, and I can edit this. I'll show you that in just a little bit. But we're in Settings, the course settings. So the first thing that we have within course details is the image. So if you want to add within your course card, so you'll notice like I have these pictures. All you have to do is click Choose Image, Upload Image, and then you get to pick from your course files. So I'm going to pick this one and it's going to upload. And now I have a welcome to class banner for my students and my sandbox course.
Now, we can change the name. I'm just going to keep the name. And we have the course code. This might be a code determined by your school district later on, um, but for in the free for teachers version, this is what it looks like. Then you can change the time zone. I'm on Pacific Standard Time. And then as we keep scrolling down, we can add a start and end date. This would be really important if you are using the free for teachers version, um, on your, your own in your classroom. So if you want students to start on a specific day in Canvas, let's say, let's do like August 12th. And then we should make sure that we're ending semesterly, not yearly. So from August, we'll go to December, and that will be my first semester content course. So then we can click these to make sure that students don't access the course before and after, or you can uncheck them depending on what you want to do. But as we keep scrolling down, basically the most important parts or where we get more core settings are down here. Now, you might not want to touch these right now, but you will probably want to come back to these later.
So the biggest one that I like to add is hiding totals in student grade summary. This is super important if you are using a grading portal outside of Canvas. If you are, let's say, using Infinite Campus or Aries or PowerSchool, one of those with Canvas, they're syncing together. If you hide the students' total grade in Canvas, then they're always going to go to the portal, which is great because sometimes the grades don't match in Canvas and their grading portal, and then they get really confused. So I just, I like to click that button. And then we'll just do Update Course Details.
And then I'm going to go to Navigation so that we can customize our course navigation bar. A lot of these things our students really don't need access to, especially, especially if they are little. Limiting how many things they can click on is a good thing. So I'm going to essentially just click and drag all of these down. The only ones that I want are the Home, Modules. I'm going to put Announcements second, I think. Uh, I don't need Assignments, I don't need Quizzes, Rubrics, all these things my students don't need access to. They do need access to Grades, and that's pretty much it. These four things right here are all my students really need access to. If you're an elementary teacher, you could even get rid of Announcements if you wanted to limit it down, that's totally fine. And then we'll click Save.
So now the course navigation over here is now in the correct order. As a teacher, you'll see all of the other navigation options. That's just because you need access to them. The next thing within the course settings that we can take a look at real quick is the application. So there are certain apps or LTI tools that work great with Canvas. Some of them being like Nearpod or Peardeck or what's another one? Amplify. There's many different apps that you can install into Canvas. Some of them might already be installed thanks to your school district if they're nice enough to you. This is where you would add external apps into Canvas. Then we have certain features that you might want to attempt to turn on, turn off. Your school district also might have those as well. Just wanted to go over all of those course settings.
Now that you have a basic understanding of where things are within Canvas, you, we've done a little basic tour of everything. Now we're going to start building, which is really exciting. So when we click on the homepage within our sandbox course, uh, and remember, we do want to start building content in a sandbox course because if you're building within an unpublished course that will be live, there are some things that can go wrong where you actually lose content. So make sure you are building in a sandbox course that you've created. The default setting for the homepage is actually the module page. Now, later, once you've created more content, you can always choose different homepages. So you can do Course Activity Stream page as front page, which that's probably the most common and what you've seen all over the internet, or all of those homepages and then Course Modules, Assignment List, and Syllabus. So we are just going to keep it as Course Modules for now because this is where we're going to build. We're not going to start, which most people like to do, we're not going to start by designing a homepage. We're going to start by building modules.
Now, what is a module? A module is essentially sections of content. So think of like chapters in a book or different units or different lessons, or maybe you're going to organize by week. It's completely up to you how you're going to organize your modules depending on your subject matter. But you should create a teacher template for every course. So how we do that, we're going to click on the plus module blue button and we're just going to type in Teacher Template Module. And right there, I always add Do Not Publish because this is something that when you import it into your live course, you want to take it with you, but you don't want it to be published for students to have access access to because it's your template. So we're going to add this module at the top.
And then let's kind of go over modules. We can click this plus button to add items. Now, here are all the different types of items you can add in Canvas: Assignments, Quizzes, Files, Pages, Discussions, Text Headers, External URL, and External Tools. So we are going to ignore these last two right now. To create an assignment, we are just going to click Create Assignment and we're going to give it a title. So I'm just going to type in Assignment Template. There we go. And then click it to add it. Now we're going to do a quiz and we'll do Quiz Template and then we'll click Add the Item. We'll do another one where we're going to add a page and we're going to create just a blank page template. Okay? And then Add the Item. And then the last one we'll do is a discussion board. So Discussion Template. There, there we go. We have these four main things here. And then within the next few videos, I'm going to walk you through step by step how you can really create these. I'm going to make these into a better order by click these dots here and drag them around like so.
Within the module here, you can click the three dots. You can always edit the module. Within this edit, you actually have the option to add requirements. We don't need to do that because this is just a teacher template. I'll show you how to add requirements later. You can also move the module, you can move the content, you can delete it, you can send it. So remember earlier when I showed you how you can receive shared items, this is how you would send it. So how I would send it is I would just type in the email address of a Canvas user here. I am. So I'm just going to click it and then I will click Send. And the content has now been shared. And you'll notice when I refresh the page here, I have a little notification on my account where I can click it and then my shared content. There you go. That's, that's how it works.
Okay, within the three dots, we also have Copy To where you can copy this module to another course. You can Share to Commons, which I would not share to Commons unless you want other people to have it. And then there's also Common Favorites. So those are kind of the options for modules. Okay? And then within the three dots of each element or item in the module, you also can edit this so that we can edit the name. We can indent it, which just looks something like that where it moves over. If you don't like that, you can always move it back. And then there's also Duplicate, which is great. So let's say like your blank page, maybe it's a reading page, you've made it and you have instructions, you can now duplicate this. And what's great, so let's add a new module. Let's just title it Module One. So now when I duplicate this, click it and drag it to the next module. So that's the whole purpose of why you create a teacher template. Basically, create everything in that teacher template module and you start duplicating it and getting more specific within your content modules. So I am just going to delete this module altogether.
The other option within each element is you can move it. You can send this one item to somebody. You can copy it, you can remove it, or share it to Commons. So this is essentially it in terms of like the basics of where everything is in the course and how to change your settings and then how to create modules and how to create elements like assignments, pages, discussions, quizzes within those modules. So this is a great start. And now we're going to get into even more detail within the next video.
I want to thank you guys so much for watching this video. One thing that I forgot to kind of mention as I was demoing everything, if you have concerns about setting up a sandbox course in the free for teachers version, you should not worry about that because you can export the course and put it into any Canvas instance. So if you're worried, I don't want to create anything outside of my institution's Canvas account, don't worry. You can have your own separate free for teachers version and still use the content without having to worry about some sort of error happening in the transitioning of one instance to another.
I would greatly appreciate if you found this video helpful if you would like it and of course subscribe because there's so much more coming your way. All right guys, I will see you in the next video. Bye.