Reading Time: < 1 minute Canvas is updating their New Quizzes to make it simpler to add or edit questions from the Modules page. Previously, you’d need to open the quiz, scroll past the quiz settings, then click “Build” to access the page for adding or editing questions. But Canvas will allow you to bypass that settings page when you access a New Quiz from a module. Now, when you click the three dots to expand the menu, you’ll see an option for “Build” just below “Edit.” Click “Build” to jump straight to the Build page! Two quick notes: This feature will be available starting September 29, 2021. This change only applies…
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Adding Existing Rubrics to Your Canvas Course
Reading Time: < 1 minute In previous posts, we’ve briefly talked about creating rubrics to use in your course. Canvas has great resources for how to accomplish that in their “How do I add a rubric to a graded discussion?” and “How do I add a rubric to an assignment?” walkthroughs. Today, however, we’re tackling a subset of that topic – adding existing rubrics to an assignment or discussion. Open the “create rubric” form. For assignments, this is located under the assignment description; and for discussions, it’s in the “three dots” menu in the discussion header. Click the “Find a Rubric” link in the top right of the rubric form. This will pull…
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Adjusting to the Unknown – Reminders You’re Not Alone
Reading Time: 2 minutes With the adjustments and on-the-fly tweaks that have needed to be made over the past week, there’s no doubt that things are a bit hectic at the moment. And in times of great change, stress, and uncertainty, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Because of that, we’re not going to do any kind of deep dive into Canvas features or look ahead to shiny new tools on the horizon. We’re going to stand alongside you and remind you of the resources and groups here to help and support. Flexible Learning at CU Course The Flexible Learning at CU course covers a lot of the basics for tweaking your course to…
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Canvas Update: Printing New Quizzes
Reading Time: < 1 minute Canvas has continued expanding the available features for New Quizzes. With their latest update, you can now print off a quiz, either with or without the answers marked. Before we jump into the “how,” we’re going to spend a few moments talking about some essential details. This is only available for quizzes built with the New Quiz engine inside Canvas (quizzes indicated with the solid rocket icon). If you have your quiz set up to randomly pull questions from an item bank, you will get a random assortment of questions in your printed quiz. You would only get all questions if you set your quiz to take all questions from the item bank. The…
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Summer 2021 FOCUS Roundup
Reading Time: 2 minutes Welcome back for another semester! We know that summer is a busy time, and there’s great opportunities to take a step back and take a break. Because of that, we’re going to highlight some of the blog posts we wrote across the summer to get you back up to speed with what’s changed or been updated. Reassigning Canvas Assignments Canvas has added an easier way for you to ask your students to resubmit their work. There’s a “reassign assignment” button in SpeedGrader that you can click, and the assignment will be sent back to the student with your instructions for reworking it. For details, check out “Canvas Reassign Assignment: An Easy Way to Ask Students to Resubmit Work.” SpeedGrader Comment…
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Canvas Feature: Annotation Assignments
Reading Time: 2 minutes Canvas has added a new way for students to complete assignments – annotating a document you upload. In this kind of assignment, students have access to all the annotation tools you use in SpeedGrader and create the annotations in the same kind of view. This assignment type can only be used for individual assignments – it will not work for a group assignment. But you might be thinking “Okay, this sounds cool. But what would I even use it for?” Having your students annotate a document is flexible and can be used for a myriad of assignments. You could have your students interpret lab results or statistics. They could practice peer editing…
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Canvas Update: Item Banks in Course Navigation and Item Bank Sharing Tweaks
Reading Time: 2 minutes With the latest update, Canvas has simplified how some aspects of New Quizzes work. They’ve added Item Banks to your course navigation, and they’ve also adjusted some of the sharing settings. Item Banks in Course Navigation We’ll look at the first item well…first. We’ve talked before about the hoops to jump through to add or edit questions in New Quiz Item Banks. That method is still valid, but Canvas has added a new way to jump to Item Banks quickly – a link directly in your course navigation (if you can’t see it there, check the Navigation tab of your course settings to make sure Item Banks is…
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Canvas Update: SpeedGrader Comment Library
Reading Time: 3 minutes Canvas 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…
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Canvas Update: Release Notes Available in the Canvas Help Menu
Reading Time: < 1 minute We’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…
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Canvas Reassign Assignment: An Easy Way to Ask Students to Resubmit Work
Reading Time: < 1 minute Canvas 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. This feature is only available for some types of assignments. It’s not available for External Tool (LTI), on paper, or no submission…