Reading Time: 3 minutesCanvas is adding a new feature on June 19, 2021, to help make SpeedGrader even speedier – a library where you can save and quickly access feedback comments. Before we dive into the specifics of this new feature, we do need to define a couple of things first. What you typically think of as “SpeedGrader” is in fact two separate things that work together – DocViewer (the left side of the screen where you can see the document and annotate it) and SpeedGrader (the right panel where you enter grades and add overall feedback comments). This distinction is very important with this new feature – this is a SpeedGrader comment library. Now that we’ve made that…
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Canvas Update: Release Notes Available in the Canvas Help Menu
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe’re going to spend the next couple weeks looking at the new Canvas features being released in June. The first feature we’re focusing on is the release notes themselves. Release notes are currently available through the Canvas community website. You can go there each month to check out the planned changes or updates for Canvas. But Canvas is making it even easier to view each new installment of the release notes. Once this new update goes live on June 19, you’ll be able to access the release notes from the Canvas help menu. In that menu, you’ll see the release notes for whatever role(s) you have in…
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Canvas Reassign Assignment: An Easy Way to Ask Students to Resubmit Work
Reading Time: < 1 minuteCanvas has added a new tool in SpeedGrader to simplify your workflow. Imagine a student submits an assignment, but they dropped it in the wrong assignment or just grabbed the wrong document to upload. Previously, you’d message the student or leave a comment in SpeedGrader. The student would then need to see that note and remember to complete the request. Now Canvas has added a button in SpeedGrader that will add an assignment back to a student’s to-do list. Before we get into the how of this feature, there are some limitations you need to know about. Using the submission reassignment feature is simple. Navigate to SpeedGrader for an assignment. If your assignment meets the criteria above, you’ll see a…
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How Can I Make Sure I Don’t Miss Q&A Forum Posts in Canvas?
Reading Time: < 1 minuteStudents will always have questions to ask and a myriad of ways to ask them. They could reply to an announcement you post in Canvas, send you an email, or post in the Course Q&A forum included in the template CTL provides. That Q&A forum allows students to put forth questions for you or the other students to answer. That forum doesn’t automatically give you notifications, but they’re easy to turn on. Go to the Course Q&A forum in your course. Just below the text box on the right side, you’ll see a “subscribe” button. Click that button, and you’ll get email notifications when questions are asked. Have questions?…
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Canvas New Quiz Settings Update – Saving Settings without Entering the Quiz Build Page
Reading Time: < 1 minuteCanvas recently updated how to access New Quiz settings. With that update, you could easily get to the settings, but you also had to go through some extra clicks to get back to where you started in Canvas. This is now simplified in the update being pushed out April 28. Now when you access the New Quiz settings page, you’ll see three options – “Cancel,” “Save,” and “Build.” “Cancel” will not save any changes made and will return you to your previous page. “Save” now saves any changes and returns you to your previous page instead of pulling you into a page to add/edit quiz questions. And “Build” now saves…
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Why Did Some of My Grades Disappear in My Gradebook?
Reading Time: < 1 minuteLet’s imagine a scenario. You have an assignment in your course. Most of your students completed it, and you graded their work. One student didn’t complete the assignment, but you agreed to give them an extension. You went into the assignment settings, opened the assignment back up to them, and merrily went on your way – until you later went to grade their work and discovered you could no longer see the submitted work from any of your other students. You checked the gradebook, and sure enough, the grades you’d previously entered were no longer there either. Even though this is a scary scenario, this can be…
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How Can I Get a Deleted Item Back in Canvas?
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSometimes you’re working in Canvas, decide to remove an item from your course only to later realize either you did actually want the item in your course or you accidentally deleted the wrong item. Before you panic or start stressing, Canvas does make it easy to restore most items (and it’ll even try to restore the student data)! Go to the Canvas course where you want to restore an item. At the end of the URL, add “/undelete” – it should be right after the course id number. Your URL should look like the following: cedarville.instructure.com/courses/####/undelete. Canvas will take you to a “Restore Deleted Items” page that lists the items you can bring back. Scroll through…
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Canvas Update: Accessing New Quiz Settings
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn the latest update, Canvas made it easier to access the overall quiz settings for a New Quiz. Previously, you could set the overall points and due date for the quiz when you initially created it, then there was only a single, very specific method to access those settings again. With the update, you can now access those settings from almost anywhere in Canvas. Previously, you’d click on a New Quiz and immediately go to the “Build” page. Now when you click on a New Quiz from the Assignments, Quizzes, or Modules pages, you will be taken to the overall quiz settings page where you can adjust the quiz name, number of points, and due date/time. From…
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Best Practices for Using Essay Questions in New Quizzes
Reading Time: 2 minutesCanvas New Quizzes have many features that are helpful for administering assessments, but there are some quirks to how this tool works. Today, we’re going to look at some best practices that’ll make working with essay questions easier in New Quizzes. Make note of which New Quizzes contain essays or other manually-graded questions. Currently, those assessments do not show up in your to-do list, so you’ll need to check them in order to assign the points for the manually-graded questions in the quiz. Set your New Quizzes to manually release the grades instead of the standard automatic release. New Quizzes automatically “grade” the essay questions by assigning zero points to them until you…
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Canvas Update: New Quizzes and the Modules Page
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn the new Canvas update, you’ll see some new functionality with New Quizzes on the Modules page inside Canvas. Previously, if you tried to add a quiz from the Modules page, your only option was a Classic Quiz. If you wanted a New Quiz, you needed to create it from the Quizzes page before going back to the Modules page and adding it to your module. But with the March 20 update, the content selector for a module will now show you which quizzes in your course are Classic Quizzes and also allow you to create a New Quiz. Let’s take a look at each. Identifying Classic Quizzes In the new Canvas update, you…