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…
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How Do I Create and Edit Questions in an Item Bank and Add Them to a New Quiz?
Reading Time: 3 minutesLast week we talked about the Top Three Things to Know about New Quiz Item Banks. Today, we’re looking at the next step in that process – creating questions in the item banks, editing questions, and adding questions to a New Quiz. Creating Questions From a QTI File If you have a test bank in QTI format (such as a test bank from a publisher), you can import it into a New Quiz Item Bank. Individually If you don’t have a QTI file of questions, the other option is to add the questions manually. For this method, you’ll also want to be in the “Manage Item Banks” view. Editing Questions When you have questions in an item bank, the…
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Top Three Things to Know about New Quiz Item Banks
Reading Time: 3 minutesWith Canvas continuing to move to New Quizzes, today we’re going to look at an important piece of that puzzle – item banks. Item banks are the best way to organize your quiz or exam questions, and they will help you manage your assessments well. We’ll be talking about adding and editing questions next week, but this week we’re going to focus on the bigger picture of item banks. Item banks are accessed through a New Quiz and only through a New Quiz. If you access “manage question banks” through the Quiz page, you’ll get the Classic Quiz question banks. Note that the terminology is different – question banks is Classic Quizzes, item banks is New Quizzes. And with that detail covered, we’re…
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How Can I Send a Piece of Course Content to Another Course or Instructor?
Reading Time: 2 minutesHave you ever been working on a course and realized there was a piece of it that you wanted to use in another of your courses? Or has another instructor asked you for a piece of content and you were left with trying to figure out the best way to get it to them? Canvas has a feature that makes this easy. When you want to transfer a single item (or a few items), you can use the direct share feature to copy or send the item. These two options function a little differently – one sends the item to a user, while the other copies it to…
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How Can Students Respond to my Canvas Announcements?
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe talk a lot about Canvas announcements because they’re such a convenient way to get information out to your entire class. Today, we’re looking at another aspect of announcements – how to handle a situation when you want students to easily be able to respond to what you send out and ask questions or add comments. Canvas makes this simple. When you’re creating an announcement, check the “Allow users to comment” box under the “Options” heading. Canvas will then remember that you checked the box and keep it checked in the future. If you uncheck that box to not allow users to comment, Canvas will likewise remember that and keep that setting as…
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How Can I Reopen a Quiz for a Student (New Quizzes Makes It Easy!)
Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs we’re progressing through the semester, you may have a student come to you and ask to be let back into a quiz. Canvas makes it simple to do this, especially in New Quizzes. As a reminder, it’s easy to tell which quizzes are New Quizzes – they have the solid rocket ship icon (not the one that’s just an outline). New Quizzes has a built-in “reopen quiz” feature. With the click of a button, Canvas will allow the student back into their existing attempt. Since this is the existing attempt, students will pick up where they left off. All the questions they’d already answered will still be…
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How to Add Announcements to Your Course’s Home Page in Canvas
Reading Time: 2 minutesCommunication with your students has never been more important than it is now. With all the changes to how courses are structured and items potentially changing frequently, you want to make sure your students have the most up-to-date information and that it’s easy to find that information. We’ve talked before about using Announcements in Canvas. They’re by far the simplest way to communicate with your class – you can easily send a message to all your students that they’ll also receive by email or push notification (depending on how they’ve defined their settings), and the announcement also lives inside Canvas. But we can take this one step further and make…