Good morning, our Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube crew. What's going on? We have some real fun ones here with us today. You already know them because they happen to be famous in Canvas land.
Introducing our good friend, Chris Giles, who, as you'll remember, is the father. I like to call him the grandfather, but he doesn't like that. So we're going to go with father of this live stream program about six months ago, believe it or not. I can't believe that we made it that long.
and Kat Flippen who you all know one of our great Canvas admins from out in Georgia. We are talking today all about Canvas for Admins. We know the teachers are under an incredible amount of stress.
We know the admins are under an incredible amount of stress. We want to share some insights today that will hopefully help you to lessen that stress by at least a little bit. With that, we're going to start with our opening arguments, if you will.
Kat, what do you have to say to these admins? I understand from an IT perspective, everybody always wants to kind of take their time and really study things. And if you're new to something, especially it can be very daunting because you're new to it and you're thinking, oh, well, I have to make sure I can control everything before we roll everything out. Let me encourage you because you guys are the professionals here, but you're also moving on a tighter timeline.
Your teachers need certain things, right? The more you withhold from them, the less they want to use things in the future for the betterment of their students, their classes. To trust your teachers, trust the people who have instructional backgrounds to move forward on things, even if you're just a little worried that you don't know something.
It's OK if you don't know. The only reason why I'm surviving as an admin is because the Canvas community. Google searched everything until I've been blue in the face. So trust the Canvas family.
Trust that it's OK to move forward and try things. You're not going to break anything. Canvas is a beautiful thing that's easy to fix stuff.
So move faster. The opening argument there is trust. trust the system, trust the community. Chris, let's go on to you.
Opening arguments for Canvas admins. I'm going to say, I'm going to actually, I'm going to echo what Kat said. And the reason why is I just got off a conversation where it was actually, I was that person who was really reluctant to want to do some things because I feel concerned that we don't have it perfected yet. And so it's really hard for me to let go because we're in a district of 42,000. So I feel like that's a big concern.
So I will echo what Kat said, you know, I think it's listening to your teachers and seeing if it's within your power to go ahead and let it happen, which I'm going to take that advice today, then we're going to work towards that. The other thing too is, unless you have boots on the ground, I guess is the term, how do you know what's going on? And so really, I'm fortunate enough to be a classroom teacher as well as being in my position right now. So I'm not in the classroom today, but I've taught in classroom long enough to bring that experience in.
So having those years of the classroom teachers is going to be a really big, a big ingredient in the success of how Canvas is being used at your school district. Agreed. Love it.
So let's jump into this. Kat, let's start with you. You're a Canvas admin, a brand new one, but luckily now you have years of experience knowing how to make everything work.
Where do you start? Well, I mean, if I'm starting right now brand new, because I'm actually thinking there's so many counties in Georgia that are new. as of like a month ago.
So like Madison County and Troop County and all these little counties that are just kind of floundering. Where do you start? Well, I mean, start under your admin settings.
Like it's the best place to go and just explore and look and turn things on. The beautiful thing about how you have it structured is with those sub accounts, like as an admin, you can create a sub account that only you have to play in. So you can go and just experiment and see how things work. Yes, there is a beta.
There is a Canvas beta instance, which honestly is a lifesaver for some things, but y'all. I didn't use the beta until about a month ago. I just went in and created a sub account underneath my primary account and started playing and figuring things out. And then when I was like, okay, yeah, this makes sense.
So I'm going to go and put this into like Gum Springs Elementary and talk to the media specialists there who are kind of our technology integrationists and have them see with some teachers what it's like. And if it doesn't work, I give them, I just tell them like, hey, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, just give it a shot. And then I just take it back and you have to kind of build the plane while you're flying. And trust that whatever you do wrong is fixable.
Because, I mean, there have been cases where somebody deleted an entire course. We were actually able to go and find it thanks to my Canvas customer service person. So, Kelly, shout out to you.
I think he's not mine anymore, but he's wonderful. And he was able to fix that for us. So, there's somebody out there who can always help you.
But I would just go and click things, create things, and just see what's possible first. Love it. Chris, where do you start?
Where do you start as an admin? I think, well, first of all, hopefully your support structures are set up correctly. Like if you have sub accounts, that's awesome because that's super important.
I'm going to say make sure those are set up correctly. And I'm a big fan of going through tests, our test instance. And I'm a big fan of going into the beta instance because.
What I do sometimes is affects the whole district at the same time. And so I want to see how that works out. The other thing too is we are fortunate enough to have Canvas facilitators, what we call them, in all of our middle school and high school buildings. And they're classroom teachers or library technology teachers who are really phenomenal, who really know Canvas, who've been doing it for a while, matter of fact, for four years, who do get a stipend, who they are our best point of contact.
And so... I think what helps me in my position, because I can't answer the 400 emails that came in this week, is to set up some type of support structure where teachers can go to chat, hopefully. If they can't go to chat or the guides, then teachers go to some type of support at the building, our campus facilitators.
They work towards solving the problem with chat or with the guides. And then finally, they create a help desk ticket or email me. Just so basically we try to funnel the support to where it does get to me and I'm able to either escalate it or actually solve it. Um, that has helped me a lot in my position because then I'm able to do more without having to do truly too much more.
That's true. Um, and by the way, for those of people who are like, wait, what do you mean test and beta? It's super easy to get to that. So like, um, our, our URL is jackson.instructure.com, right?
So if I do jackson.test.instructure.com or jackson.beta.instructure.com, that will take me to the test instance and the beta instance. So good places to go. And if you're just somebody who just needs that extra kind of protective layer of things, great place to go and play.
Look at these things we're learning, everybody. OK, let's take some questions. Let's start off with April. And one of you may want to go into studio or something here. But April is asking, can teachers and students live stream from campus?
So I'm not we're not studio customers, but I'm assuming, Chris, are you guys studio customers at all? We are as of yesterday. If you don't know what it is, it really is phenomenal. It's something that's a goal that we want to have in Jackson right now, which is funding wise.
But Chris, tell us about that. That's amazing. I don't, I don't believe I could be wrong. I don't believe that you can live stream from Canvas Studio because it's more about a recording from either a student's perspective or recording from teacher's point of view. And then if a teacher's recording or using a YouTube video, they're going to add different question types.
to that question, to that video, kind of like an Edpuzzle-like environment. As far as live streaming, we actually use Zoom to do that. If you are in a district that has Zoom Pro accounts or Zoom teacher licenses, not just basic, then you can go to your Zoom settings and set up live stream and then set up your YouTube channel as a school employee. And we do live streaming directly from Zoom directly to live stream YouTube, unlisted. So the only way that anybody can find the video is if I share it.
The benefit to that is it's automatically in YouTube once I live stream a lesson. And then I can embed it in Canvas very quickly. And the benefit of the piece that I love is that Canvas says no to all the advertisement and no to all the next videos.
Like, it's a beautiful thing. Yes, a kid can click on YouTube and go, but that's the functionality. So we do live streaming through Zoom.
right to YouTube, and then we can take that shared embedded link and put it right in Canvas for students to access. So I'm not quite sure if that's April's question, but when I think of live streaming, that's my thought. Perfect answer. Our queen, Beth Crook is here, the Canvas queen, if you will, of Studio.
She does bring up a good point here that you cannot live stream from Studio. That's not the purpose of it, but the benefits for teachers and students are many. If you have other questions, feel free to reach out to me specifically, April. Kat here on YouTube, is there a way to set... different default notification settings for all of our students.
All right, Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, but we are actually not able to mass implement notification settings across the board as an admin. Yeah, then I know we're not able to actually create those. We're only able to encourage people to do it either at their own account level or to set notifications at the course level.
The great thing is that Canvas listened to us, all of us. and enable that so a student and a parent can actually set up course notifications. My hashtag this year is inform me, don't annoy me. So learn how to dial those notifications down. But yes, like Kat said, we can't root level force notifications, but not yet.
I mean, I'm down with hopefully maybe that might be a change. I mean, that would be that would be nice. Just as an admin perspective, I get that request all the time beginning of the year. I'm sure you do Chris too that just Hey, can you push this out? We can't.
Usually, I'm also the Google domain administrator, and we can push out a lot of changes that way. But Canvas administrators, I mean, you have a lot of things you can do, but there's also a lot of things that you can't that really are in the hands of the teachers. Like, I think there's some LTI integrations that you can turn on, like Flipgrid. We can't do that for you either. That's all you, right, as the individual.
So there's a couple of things that even we can't do for you, but that's a good thing. Like, y'all need to have some control, too. Teacher need to have control, too.
Love it. As we speak, I am dropping in the comments this excellent guide. Note to self, and Chris is a big, big advocate of this, go to the Canvas community. If you haven't been there already, community.canvaslms.com.
It is the gold mine of all gold mines for any Canvas users. If there's a question that you have, likely somebody else has already figured it out. If not, you can guarantee Chris and Kat are digging into it right as we speak. So go check it out.
Check out that guide I just shared. Hilde, another incredible Canvas admin. Welcome, my friend.
Let's see here. We've got somebody, Kelly, who's saying that they live stream through Adobe Connect. Right.
Like a webinar platform like Zoom or WebEx. Correct. And YouTube used to have a live stream. So YouTube used to have a Hangouts on Air feature that kind of got nixed.
And they do have a YouTube live feature, but it's only a one-way stream. You can't have multiple people like we have that have it set up right here. So, but that exists too. There's a bunch of different things.
Totally. So Kelly, this is a hard one for us to hear because you got some Canvas fans right over here, but we understand your feeling. So let's have, let's start with Chris on this one.
Chris, we're going to have you respond to Kelly on. Canvas seems a little bit convoluted. Teaching 100% online for the first time. Where does someone like Kelly start? I'm going to give my same feel I've given for the past three years.
I feel like there's a couple of real simple things. One is everything that your students are going to do has a due date. That's, of course, if you're teaching in an online space where there's normal due dates.
I've taught online where you don't have due dates. But if you have due dates, put due dates on assignments. And then that helps students understand when they go to the calendar what's due, when it's due, and how do I find it. With that also being said. I make a daily agenda, just like if you were in a physical classroom and you and your kids come in and they say to you, Miss Kat, what are we doing today?
It's always the same two questions. What are we doing? What did I miss? And your response is usually the same thing.
Hey, look at my whiteboard or something. So I I create a calendar event in my classroom on the day and I say, here's what we're learning today. Here's two or three tasks we're doing.
And here's how you're engaged in your learning. And so I just create that routine in that procedure because those questions don't go away. Online, physical, it doesn't matter. A student needs to know what we're learning, what we're doing, and how that relates to the due dates that are coming up. So my Canvas in three steps is just simply, I would say, leverage the calendar.
And my really good friend, Brad, would say make sure you're organized in the module so your students can easily find and locate the material as well. Kat, what about you? Kelly's got another question here that came up that said, yes, due dates, but they're very hard to put in. All right, so let me address Kelly from. two perspectives one from her perspective another from an admin perspective too because there's something that admin can do to kind of help with this okay um you know that book the first days of school 31 everyone guess yes so you know the first question they ask is always you know where where do i sit so i always imagine canvas as being that digital platform that digital where do i sit right i've am i walking in i'm opening up my computer as a door i'm going to walk in There is where I want to sit.
I look up and I need to see exactly what I need to see. So always starting with something right when they land, you want them to see what they want to see. That's why people are always obsessed about that Bitmoji classroom thing, right?
Or buttons or something. You want them to have that direction. Even if you jump out to something else, start there.
And I'm thinking for elementary people who are still kind of getting into modules, right? Like I'm a secondary person. I love my modules. But elementary folks, that homepage is where it's at.
So make that and get that started and run with that. It doesn't have to be pretty either. Links are fine.
The next piece is for my admin friends. Right. And even people, if you're a sub account admin.
OK, what you want to do is set up something that people can easily put into their courses that takes away that initial kind of sticker shock of, oh, my God, what am I looking at? It's a beautiful thing because I get it. It's a blank canvas. You can start from wherever you need to start with.
But that's very daunting, especially when you're used to something like classroom, which frankly is a very simple. a almost not simple but simplistic interface with a stream that honestly is not very conducive to long-term semester year learning right so um if you as an admin can create i created something i called just a basic like a startup template and just make it so there's a page with a front page and you just take you do some of the navigation set you know how you have the navigation bar with all the course uh pages like pages and you have conferences and modules you as an admin just create one course with a blank setup with a front page and then clean up all those navigation things put in the comments for all your people to put into that solves so many problems like you it suddenly it's like oh wait i have my page here i can my kids can't access chats that we don't like we don't like our kids access chats we try to make sure everybody hides it we can control it that way too so as an admin sit down with somebody learn how to do that put in the comments and somebody said like where to start professional learning or professional learning ideas What a great way to start with professional learning when you're doing Canvas from the start is, hey, let's go to Commons. Let's take this little startup template, put it into your course, and then you can run from there.
Another plug, another plug for the community and and and thus for Commons as well. The Commons, if you're not using it, admins and teachers, it is. Why don't one of you, Chris or Kat, talk us through really quick what the Commons is and why it's beneficial to educators all over.
Yeah, I'm going to just simply say it's I think it's OK to ask people for help. Like, you know, the Facebook group has one hundred some thousand. The other Facebook group has twenty five.
It's OK to ask people for help because not every single nuance is in the community. Right. It's totally fair.
But at the same time, it's also a good idea, a good practice to go there first. The reason why it's the most probably up to date version of what you're looking for. Kat and I are two different districts, so my question might be different than her. her experience in her district.
We don't have great pass back. Maybe Kat does. And that might be specific.
But I still feel like if I'm a teacher and I really want to make sure I'm steered correctly, going to, and when I say community, I mean, click the little question mark in Canvas and click search the guides. Like that's a good place. Or I don't know if you noticed, but the question you just emailed me, I just Googled it and came to the community and found the answer.
So I think it's okay. It's good practice to just Google your question and you'll end up with a community. Love it.
So Mark here has a question on YouTube. And I'm going to bucket this down to just how do you know if you're doing okay, Kat and Chris? What reports?
Is there a report that you run on a regular basis? Is there something from a data perspective that you use? And I know that Kat is a big time data nerd.
I know she won't get mad at me for calling her that, but she kind of is. There's a Venn diagram though that geek, nerd, and dork. Have you seen this? I'm a geek on that diagram. It's a record.
So why don't you take this, our resident data nerd? Why don't you start on this one? Any reports or things you're doing to know how you're doing?
Yes. All right. So my admin friends who are also a little more braver than the usual admin folk, there are certain things that I've done in Canvas. Now, granted, you have some really quick disclaimer.
Everything I'm about to say is not going to be easy to do necessarily, but I found it on the commons, and you have to always maintain it as Canvas updates, okay? I am. I went into the code and kind of edited it so I could do Google analytics. So I'm able to actually go and see per sub account now because I have it.
So again, sub accounts, I think we keep on mentioning this, but that structure is important. Your whole count, like for me, Jackson County is the whole account and every school is a sub account and you can create whatever sub accounts you need. I have one for blueprint courses. I have one for manually created courses.
So you kind of section it off so you could have buckets, right? But I have Google analytics set up and it's in the common, just go to the rather the community, go to the community and kind of search. Somebody has it there.
Try it out. And it's nice because I can actually see in real time kind of the usage. So we also have GoGuardian set up.
So GoGuardian is our filtering and GoGuardian teachers. We able to get those kind of stats. That's just hits.
Right. I like to kind of get down to the sub account level and see what's going on. So that's where I start.
Usually there are reports that are in the admin console. Like rather the admin settings you can run. I just had to run one. So we had a student somehow the account got deleted, which I still don't know how.
But because I figured out, guess what? Through the community, I figured out how to undelete an account and get it back set up so she can be provisioned again. I'm telling you all, tons of stuff. It's all CSVs, but it's a job done.
Love it. And believe it or not, Chris just dumped a link to the community about how to set up Google Analytics. Chris, anything else you got? And I don't have the Google Analytics.
And so Kat's kind of encouraged me to look into that. Because we, and I'm not the Google domain. with their IT, which side note, make sure you have a really good relationship with your IT to make your job easier.
My IT is amazing. So I want to hopefully put the link in and then for my goal is to go ahead and see what kind of Google Analytics can we set up in Canvas, because we don't use that. We use the reports and the reports are really challenging because it really comes down to, I think in my opinion, what is the question you're asking? That's really what it comes down to. And sometimes the CSV file will we'll spit it out but it still comes down to what's the question you're asking and so a lot of times for us in our district what's unpublished that's really what we want to know and those reports exist there um so and i'm not a data nerd i'm probably somebody who would like to aspire to be one but i'm not right and all the csvs for that like i'm looking at my instance right now but underneath as an admin you see all the little admin navigation tools there at the very bottom under settings and you have reports and you can just run there's a ton of reports you can do and reports within reports.
And again, it's just a CSV that spits out, but you know, you can figure out how to read them, but there's a ton of stuff. And I'll say also for us. Because we do automatically provision our accounts.
We do have everything running through our assist. Yeah. But then we also have a lot of accounts that we get hand created because our paraprofessional or non-teaching staff, we also add by hand.
So we also do run the last enrollment activity and also just last activity and last login so that we're able to see like if somebody hasn't logged in in three years, we probably need to go clean up those accounts. Yeah. And I think to the reports question, I think and I don't know for your industry, but one of the biggest challenges we're having, in my opinion, is. how do you take attendance um and i in my opinion there's a difference between you're here that's attendance and you're here and you're engaged um and so i don't i don't want to spend time doing that but that is one question we are as i think as a school this we're wrestling with how do we what's the best way to show attendance um and so i don't feel like reports in canvas really speak to that very well there is a new report feature when every teacher can go to analytics and they can click on reports and it's a new feature that shows but it's a week actually it's up to 36 hours old so even though the blurb says real-time data uh it's actually 36 hours old so if it was literally up to the moment i think that would be a pretty decent space to go spend as a custom teacher to see who connected with your class because it would be up to the moment but we don't currently have that up to the moment so we use we just purchased drop a detective which is great guardian And we're hoping to kind of leverage that.
Yeah, that's why we did GoGuardian Teacher. We also use Clever for a lot of our single sign-on rostering. And we do single sign-on into Canvas two ways, Gmail or Google, and also through Clever. Clever does give us our real-time. You can actually see if they're on there at that time, little green dots.
So there's a bunch of tools that integrate with everything. But Canvas with the new analytics, I mean, that gets there. Good for reporting for parents, too.
We've had people who print those out and send them to parents and be like, yeah, your kid hasn't shown up. So that helps a lot. I like that.
Yeah. Okay, here's a comment here on, I think it was Kelly's comment earlier about being a little bit convoluted. This person says, my response is Canvas is always so much simpler than what you expect it to be. And sometimes we even make it a little bit more difficult as Kat and Chris have been dealing with helping people around the community.
They may try and start at a level that's, maybe they shouldn't start there. Keep it simple. Keep it simple, I think is what they'd say to you.
Let's keep going because we got a whole ton of questions. Yeah. Okay. And to speak to that real quickly, I think what's helped us just really quickly, one is we come up with a school-wide, a district-wide Canvas agreements that are based on these levels of Canvas usage. So we really have done our best to say, as a whole district, we really want our teachers to be working towards this level, which has some agreements like everybody's got a homepage.
Your homepage looks very similar. So that has been an actual helpful success in our district. So anyways.
That's a great idea. We took, there's that checklist that gets sent out at the beginning of the school year, and it's like beginning of school year checklist. And my boss is the assistant superintendent teaching learning. He went through and put stars next to everything to kind of like rank it.
Like everybody needs to be at the one star level, but if you can get to star two or star three, that'd be excellent. So it's nice to have some sort of communication like that. Look at that, Chris, we agree. Look at this, there's agreement going on. Chris, let's start with you on this one.
What are your top five best practices coming here from YouTube? So I think actually, so just real quickly, one was our school district coming up with this Canvas agreements levels. We had teachers and other Canvas facilitators help. So it wasn't just me.
We created this and then pushed it out to our teachers so that everybody can speak the same language. So that's actually been a really big thing because our goal is any training, any conversations, any PD is kind of hopefully highlight those components in our agreements. That's one thing. And then the second thing is we made a template for. high school, middle school, and elementary.
I had amazing folks create the elementary one. I had a really great friend who created the high school middle one. And so that gave less burden to a teacher. Like now I have a homepage, even though I might personalize it, which is what I should do, I don't have to start from scratch.
So those are my two big takeaways that I think has kind of helped us move to where we're at right now. Kat, other takeaways from you that are just must haves, must dos for admins? All right.
So we are an infinite campus district. And one of the biggest things that we wanted to do is to control like all the courses that are made. So we went ahead. One of the first things that we ever did was go ahead and do the rostering.
I love I'm a big fan of single sign on and rostering is one less thing that people have to remember. But also the fact that your course is already pre rostered and will update every night with the sync is a wonderful thing as an admin. Now, granted, if you also have a gazillion sections, you're going to have to then discuss cross listing. But like an infinite campus, there is a check.
If you're an infinite campus person. Listen closely. There's a checkbox you can turn on. It's called exclude LMS.
So as long as all the kids are enrolled in like the homeroom class or if they're enrolled in whatever the regular the point we call zero classes, you can exclude all those extraneous sections that count for FTE. And so they only they only see just the ones they have to see. It won't be so confusing.
Right. So that's the first thing I think that if you want to do that, start there. You cannot do that in the middle of the year. So screw everything up.
Don't do that. Something else, if you do do that. Don't change section numbers. Don't change course numbers, period. Please repeat this ad nauseum with your school admin and leadership.
If they're going to go do schedule changes, one, please tell you as the admin. You just need to know. And then to just say, OK, if you can somehow make this happen without changing the section number or at least keeping the same teacher tied to it somehow, the Canvas course won't suddenly disappear.
We just had someone on the secondary Facebook group post that they just all their courses went away. This happened to a whole school of mine at the very beginning of the semester. That's what happens when you change schedules during the middle of the year. If you're a you sync with your sis.
So just a heads up with that. And other than that, guys. I mean, make sure your sub accounts are set up.
And I would honestly, I think the third thing I would say is pick your people to be your sub account admins. Because like I have one person per school who can go in and can help identify like troubleshoot problems. You need that person per school, especially I'm a smaller district than Chris.
But in the largest district like that, you've got to have sub admins. You can have an admin for every sub account. Right. And then what's nice, too, is I believe in visibility.
So I went and played with the admin roles. So I created an admin role I called school leadership, where all they could do is just go and see everything. And I gave them that sub admin right within all my sub accounts. So now they can log in.
They can see all the courses that are there. So less questions that come to you as an admin, but they have that visibility. I mean, just little things like just little set of things like that that matter, especially from the beginning of the school year. So if you're thinking about integrating your student information system, wait till January.
Otherwise, those that help, you want that help built in with sub account admins, I would think. And I'd like to add, if you have year-long courses like we do, we have year-long, quarter-long, semester-long, if you have year-long courses, we've also set up grading periods so that those year-long courses are chunked into four small grading periods in a school. This is the first year we did that.
So, and to kind of echo what Kat has mentioned, setting up Canvas permissions, we set up this, we're just trying this out. a role called substitute teacher. So if a teacher is coming in to substitute for a classroom teacher, we have a role called substitute teacher.
And those are based off of certain permissions. Well, the challenge is to make a role that doesn't allow the ability to edit, destroy, create, or modify a course, but be able to actually do something. And so Canvas is granular, but not granular enough. So we do our best to create a Canvas role for substitute teachers. And we're trying to create role that protects might be office manager which allows this one individual at the school to be responsible to add teachers or sub teachers to courses Because subbing is probably I'm assuming cats same thing except a substitute teacher in an emergency Situation in a remote learning is a really big challenge.
We've never had to deal with this before And so we're just trying to figure out How do we add a sub who has some ability but not full ability and then who does that? So Chris question from Neil, by the way. Oh, I'm coming.
We're coming. Chris, you just asked about a detailed resource. I just dropped that blueprint link within the community down there. So take a look at that.
Let's take this one first. Receive many questions on a daily basis about canvas. So she scheduled a virtual open house to answer all questions. What cat, Chris, what are you doing?
Any other ideas for a really busy admin? If you have a support structure, like we set up, that helps a lot. Like having a canvas.
Well, a support. We have buildings, so I don't know if you have buildings at your university, but I try to we try to funnel the help. Go to your teacher.
Teacher goes to the support person. Support person comes to me just so that it's not just a wave coming to you directly. It's more of a pinpoint wave. That's good.
So I have I spent a year and a half at a little college called Georgia Gwinnett College. I was in higher ed for a year and a half. And I OK, hold you ready for this.
I was the administrator for D2L. Yeah, I know the difference between the two. Let me say thank God for Canvas right now, because that was a nightmare. But the big piece was we had to find kind of our champions at every school. So like I had my champion at the School of Ed, I had my champion at the School of Health.
And those people, like I would meet with them and they would be the ones who would go out and proliferate, almost like a kind of following a three to me. Right. So you say, all right, have you checked the community or have you checked our own internal FAQ? And have you asked so-and-so at your school? If you've done all these three things, you still have questions, shoot it to me.
Love it. Okay, moving down to this HPSD technology tips. You're wanting some kind of Zoom with trainer. Shoot me a note.
Mark.booth, M-A-R-K.booth, B-O-O-T-H-E, at Instructure.com. We have this really cool, great training program in Instructure. We've also got something called the Center for Leadership and Learning, which both Chris and Kat have been a part of. And I'm sure we've got something there that can help you.
So shoot me an email. We'll hook you up. Hilly, is there a report that shows how many new Observer accounts parents created, say in September? Provisioning report, we'll do that.
Yeah, so if you go to the admin button on your black canvas navigation. then go all the way click on your account your account that pops up all the way down to settings and the very top there's reports or uh yeah and i'm looking at right now and there's a provisioning report and uh you can by then you can actually you actually click so when you when you click on configure the provisioning report it'll ask you what do you want to see and so you can actually check like observer roles right chris yes and what's interesting is that hillary and i have had this conversation we intentionally do not allow anybody to set up accounts outside of our district i am the only person who does that um because we use our SIS to automatically generate Canvas course, Canvas accounts for parents based on EdWrite. So we do that intentionally because we don't want to have to deal with who got into Canvas account without us knowing.
So I think Hilly's a good question because that's a really good awareness anyways. Yes, that actually encourages me by the way, Chris, because we had to shut it down. We actually had an issue where a student figure out, well, I can go and look at my friends.
I can add somebody else's. It happened to us. we shut that down um and so we're actually working with canvas so they have amazing tech support to help us get everything running with our student information system to sync it so yeah and we feel we feel more confident we have we had a couple of snap foods but we feel more confident uh having parents create it because of our sis and their ed rights less for me to have to validate and check amen love it it's not so big but it's it's good yeah we're moving here you two are popular Um, someone here is asking, where do you get a canvas hat like that? Well, let me tell you, you can get some pretty incredible swag a week from, I don't know what date is, wait for Thursday, the 15th, um, 15th at canvas combat. Guess what?
Registration expires this week on the 9th. That's Friday, I believe at 5 PM. If you haven't registered, click on that button, the link, wherever that thing is, where's my finger? Click on the link and register.
Kat's going to be there. I know she's speaking in a session. Chris is there and he is very likely going to get finagled into speaking on a session that he doesn't have to prepare for before Chris. Don't worry, because there's a very fun distance learning session that we're doing live with Kat and Mark Painter and more. So anyways, Chris is being recruited.
I got this hat from my good buddy Isaac. A shout out to Isaac because he thought I was cool. Isaac from Miami. Isaac for the win.
Let's take this question from Kat. Besides Mastery Connect, is there a way to download outcomes at the end of the year and upload them into a new course for the beginning of the year? So you should not have to touch this as an admin.
I mean, I know linking it into the course. Right. We actually had our customer service representative.
What do you call them? The customer representative. He was he actually was able to add all our state. standards for us into our instance. And then I wanted my teachers to know how to add those themselves because it's, you don't want to use everything necessarily, but go in and kind of work through that.
So that's something that you can give them a guide to. And, you know, we're, we're, we're getting into that a lot more now with everything kind of linked in to mass, the mastery grade book, but you shouldn't have to do upload them and download them over and over again into your courses. If it exists at the top level, which you don't have to do yourself.
if they can, Canvas will add that for you, then you can pull it in. And if you already have a course built from last year and you take that and dump it into a new course for this year, it also carries over whatever outcomes you tied into that course, too. So you don't need to be doing that. Love it.
Let's take the question from Neil that got brought up earlier. Chris, who wants to take this one? I'll start. I'll start because Infinite Campus person.
Right. So, yes, it doesn't sync the non-teaching rules. All right. So twofer. You can have people who actually can provision those accounts.
I just create some of them by hand, for example. I actually have a homepage I created for every school that they use to centralize all their documents. We don't have network drives.
When I came on board in 2017 with my system, we got rid of network drives. Everything's in Google Drive. That gets convoluted.
Well, you can link everything to Google Drive through Canvas. So they have these beautifully done homepages. But we have to add parapros and our food service workers and everything in there, too.
So we have most of those added by hand, and then we just manage them from there using those. reports, right? However, when it comes to parapros and Infinite Campus, you can have, we've added all of our staff to Infinite Campus.
You can mark them as a co-teacher, but not FTE counted, right? So that way they still get counted as a teacher, but it won't affect your FTE counting to your state reporting. So that's possible.
And we do things a little differently. We actually use an HR system that creates an account for every single staff member in our entire district, whether you're a teacher or not. So everybody has an account.
And then like Kat says, we've been doing this for about three years, four years now. We actually have. all student courses, grade level courses, graduation classes, the class of 2021, and all staff courses at every single school in our district, so that all the staff members at that school are involved, are enrolled in this one course where there could be communication sent out to the staff. Oh yeah. And that's been a huge, we've been doing that for about three or four years, and it's been a huge blessing.
And this year we're doing class of 2021, 22, 23, and 24. And the idea is that those classes of 21, 22, whatever it is, would roll up until that eventually would phase out and those students have graduated. And then the real goal of that is if you're collecting any evidence towards graduation requirements, it continues to flow for the next three or four years until that class is finished. And so that's been a really big help.
That goes back to the question earlier, like what are our top five? And that was one thing that I probably should have added was there is this. classes, all student courses, all teachers courses. Yeah, those are really powerful things to have at the schools. That's a good point for buy in.
Like we started putting we have leadership meetings, so we actually have a course for all teaching and learning department. We have a course for all the principals. I made one for our leadership retreat.
I went in and made a sub account and then I hacked through the code. So it's Star Trek themed. And that's buy in, right? That gets buy in. People can actually see what this is because leadership often does not use it enough, right?
So getting them in for the home pages and all those things will get them involved as well. Yeah. Let's jump onto this one. Is there a way to enter grades, but not have every grade show all the time, especially in elementary?
I'd like to keep anecdotal notes at times. And even though even thought about making a weekly assignment that summarizes my notes, observations, et cetera. Any thoughts? Well, if you're going to if it's about creating a canvas assignment, as soon as you create an assignment, a space is created in that gradebook. Now you can choose not for graded.
right, which is totally fine, or you can choose how you want to. So I'm not quite sure if that's, like, if you're specifically speaking to the Canvas gradebook, or if you're speaking to, like, you have a cyst that you have to eventually sync to or put some of the scores in. I just considered Canvas as my paper gradebook.
If you're, if you've taught as long as I have, that's how I started out with a paper gradebook. It's the evidence of collection of student work. And so, no, not everything's going to be graded, so you can choose not graded if you wanted to.
So I'm not quite sure, I apologize, but that's the question on your answer. I'm not sure if this is the same person because it doesn't show, that shows up as Facebook user, but how do I get rid of those grade summaries? Go to settings, all the way down to more options and click hide total from students.
I'm assuming that's what they're asking is how do you get rid of the percentage grade for the course? And if you go to that where it says options and then hide total from students. Basically, what it does is it helps the students focus on what I is. Our terminology is scores and feedback in Canvas. The final grade is in your grade book, your SIS.
And so by letting that checkmark be in your Canvas course, it hides the percentage of what those students think they're getting for an overall course. So I'm not quite sure if that was what your question is, but that's my interpretation of that. Love it.
Kat, anything to add on those? Nope. Same.
Same thing. That's what we encourage. If people don't understand how to do that, we encourage them to hide the gradebook entirely from the course navigation so kids don't see it.
They just look at everything in Infinite Campus or Student Information System instead. But otherwise, if they do show that, they turn off that and see that final grade feature. Love it.
Let's take this one. When I have a repeated assignment due each Friday, it sometimes causes a problem. I don't believe you can create Canvas assignments to have repeated dates. Yeah, I was going to say, unless you literally hit add, add, add and a new date, which I think that I'm not quite sure if that's that would be problematic.
Yeah, because once a grade is entered, it's like you need to close the assignment. Yes. Yeah.
I think what I'm looking from your perspective, what you're saying, Chris, and what our Facebook user might be saying. So people who are like a little lost when you do an assignment, you have that ability at the very bottom to say who you assign it to. So maybe what she's doing. or he is uh you know extending that period or adding a okay i'm going to sign it to my whole class now i'm going to reassign it again to my whole class it doesn't work that way because think of it as a once i create a um once i create assignment that is a one time like a box in my grade book right and i can't make that repeat now you can just copy it you can just do a copy and have that assignment copy uh that might be it yeah so every i was being logged yeah so you see that that every week they have a reading log so um Yeah, I would just make an assignment and just copy it.
over and over again so and it comes down to the format if your students are writing in a google document and that's the reading log then really it just simply be a new assignment hey continue on your same google document as your reading log but then just submit to me maybe the new page so i always ask the questions are always the same what's the format that the students are engaging with how are they going to give to me and how am i giving them feedback so that kind of drives my perspective when i create assignments because then i know how to best choose the best type of an assignment and if it is reoccurring that's fine just I agree with Kat maybe it's just simply a new assignment each week I like the way you put it it's much easier if you just make it an upload they can just put the same link each time you have the same log and a Google Doc I love that idea yeah it's just a matter of what it is that you want what's here what's task purpose and audience right it always comes down to those three things right even if it's word to they can upload it over and over again same document they want so yeah love it Take this one question about roles. We're having trouble using the observer role for our faculty advisors who need to see student grades. But being observers makes for a very overwhelming view.
Now, yes, and that's what I was talking about earlier about making custom admin roles. So you at the top level has to be the top level admin. The account goes into the settings and then goes and just creates a new role.
So that's what we did for our school leadership role. So we made it. We had to test it out, of course, but.
We made sure that they can only go and see everything. They couldn't assign anything. They couldn't create anything. They couldn't delete anything.
So that's possible. And then you just take those people and you add them to that role. You can add a person to multiple roles, by the way.
Yeah, and we have that exact same thing. We have a role called Canvas. We have a role called School Admin and Counselors.
And in that role, looking right now, they can view the course. They can see everything in the course. They can see the students, the students'grades, but they cannot edit, create, modify, or destroy on purpose. And so then, just like Kat said, you go to each of those subaccounts and add those individuals, and you choose that role from the dropdown.
You'll have a dropdown of roles that you can choose from. Yeah. Love it. Okay. We're going to go back to one of those first questions that we had about the top five things that you need to do as an admin.
And I know Chris has been taking some notes over here as well. So, Chris, let's start with you. We're coming back again. Top five or three, I don't care what the number is.
What are the top things that you have to do as an admin? Well, I feel like, again, if you have control over being able to have some type of district-wide vision for agreements and levels of where teachers are moving towards, that's helpful. Having a blueprinted template that every teacher's course will get, whether it be a middle school one, a high school one, an elementary one, just so teachers don't have to start from scratch.
And that also strips down the navigation on the left to make it very similar. So those are two big things. And then we... intentionally created an all staff course all student course and grade level courses at every one of our schools so if a school wanted to communicate to just sixth graders and have just sixth grade content like from say outdoor school or something then those sixth graders are enrolled in that sixth grade course and there in that course our content or things related to just specifically to them and then they could also just send a message to just sixth graders at that school And then this year we went with a class of 2021 and 22, the graduation classes at the high schools.
And the goal is those would roll up each year automatically synced with their SIS. And then they're using those to collect any evidence towards a student's graduation, not coursework. Just we use another thing that requires students to have some evidence towards graduation. Those could be contained in there.
And the term CAD is default so that it doesn't It doesn't end until we physically make that end. So those are my top three. I feel like those have helped us. Yeah. What about you?
Well, yeah, I'm looking through right now. I'm trying to think. There's so many that I want to second.
It's nice to know somebody else who did that, too, with the with our school homepages and help them set up. Getting that leadership buy in helps a lot with them understanding the structures on Canvas, which can pass down to the school. Right.
The school leader makes or breaks the culture of school. Right. And then from more of a. like a back-end perspective, I'm trying to think from that to the two perspectives of somebody who's trying to influence adoption and professional learning, but also somebody who's just the back-end admin, who's trying to set everything up correctly. Right.
Don't forget to look at your feature at options. Cause that changes a lot. If you're not going to the community and you haven't subscribed to all the release notes, for example, you really, really need to do that.
Cause there's a lot that rolls out. They rolled out a ton of stuff, March, April, and may, for example, but like right now I'm looking, I'm trying to see if there's anything that. I have turned on or that I have turned off. Like the confetti for on-time submissions is there confetti for valid links.
I didn't even know that was a new option, but it's there and we haven't turned on. Thank God. Right.
And then like, there's a bunch of stuff that you can allow versus on and off. So go to your feature options and look, and that also accounts for sub-admins. Sub accounts also have featured options.
So example, there's a, there's a, Canvas elementary theme. That's awesome. Every single elementary teacher likes it.
They love it. I think it's in common sense, but we're not going to judge that too much right now. So you can go to those sub accounts and turn that on.
Meanwhile, for my secondary ones, I have it turned off. So your feature options are huge. Also your apps, you know, any LTI integrations that you can set up at your level or at a sub account level, go ahead and do that yourself. It cuts down on so much confusion.
Because you are the one that really the progenitor of that kind of stuff and that back end stuff. But otherwise, it's a lot of just organization. Oh, you know, we can do the commons.
In the commons, you can go and curate stuff, right? Because you can feature things in the commons now. That pops at the very top of everybody's searches. So as you find things or if you push things out or somebody makes stuff to push out, you can make market as featured in your system. So people see that first.
So just little things like that that make a huge difference across the board. And I was just thinking about the feature option this morning, Kat, and I didn't realize that Canvas had released the new assignment. I'm sorry, the new submission types. And it's a feature option.
And teacher had turned on by mistake and she was freaking out and I didn't even know it was there. And so, yes, that's a good call for me to go back and just double check that those feature options are either on or allow. Yeah.
Which I have a quick question for you as an admin. Knowing some of these feature options are going to become. considered a forced option soon. How do you communicate or how much time, like right now, for example, the new rich content editor is a feature option that's allowable, but it is going to become a forced feature. And so I just, I don't know right now I'm wrestling when, how much time, how do I show that to, how do I tell people about that before?
Right. Well, similarly, let's say, you remember when the rich content editor changed, right? We went ahead and just said, we're just going to do it. This is one of the moments where I'm a different type of admin, I guess. Like I just I'm not going to wait too much because if you wait too long, people get too attached to something as they're learning it.
So we went ahead and just changed it. Then we share the information. So quick and easy email or I had my media specialist at every school email. I also have a remind group.
We purchased remind premium. So I have a remind for instructional technology and then more are more innovative and early adopter folks are on there. So I can send out information quickly that way, too. Just communicating, communicating, ad nauseum, putting it somewhere.
I also have a staff portal that pops up automatically for people. And I will put that information at that top front page. They say, hey, this is an update that's happened just to be aware.
So as long as you get it in front of their face, they know the changes and just have your people who are supporting at the schools ready to support run with it. So like with this new thing right now with the submission type, same thing I want to do with the rich content editor, too. So I think, yeah. Awesome.
Yeah, there's so many things for admins. I'm trying to think of all these little details that I've learned. The themes. Can we just talk about themes really quick?
The colors matter and how you set up. You know, so having a common theme, we don't allow our sub accounts to have a theme because we want to have a district wide theme. But you can have your sub accounts design their own themes and have their own colors set up.
But then also talk about high contrast. Bring in your assistive technology folks to talk about the high contrast options. Right.
Immersive reader. Microsoft has a great immersive reader. Turn that on. Experiment with that.
There's all these little things that you need to be aware of that will affect the teacher that they don't necessarily know exist. So you have a lot of power. Use it wisely.
Love it. Well, as always, it is a pleasure to have these these rock stars here on the old live stream. I dropped the link again.
If you have not registered for CanvasCon, you you want to do it. I promise. Whether that's to be able to get access to on demand content after the fact. to get some really cool swag. I mean, don't wait.
Just go sign up because we're going to run out of time and you're not going to be able to register. After the night, the 5 p.m. mountain daylight time, you won't be able to register anymore because of the system that we're using. Go register.
Thanks everybody for joining us. We will be seeing you. We are off tomorrow, but back on Thursday.
We'll see everybody soon. Have a great day. Bye guys.