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 Library

Speaking of SpeedGrader, Canvas has added a way for you to save overall feedback comments easily with their comment library. The comment library isn’t by course, so whatever comments you add, you’ll see in all your courses. “Canvas Update: SpeedGrader Comment Library” has all the details you need to understand the specifics and get started.

Canvas New Quiz Item Banks

We’re going to shift focus for a moment and talk about New Quiz Item Banks. We’ve chatted about them a lot recently, but Canvas has made them easier to access and share with other instructors. Check out “Canvas Update: Item Banks in Course Navigation and Item Bank Sharing Tweaks” for the full details.

Microsoft Immersive Reader in Canvas

With Canvas’ ongoing partnership with Microsoft, some cool tools are available for you and your students to use in your course. Micrsoft Immersive Reader allows you or your students to adjust how a Canvas Page appears to focus on specific text while reading, and it can even read the text aloud. For the details, check out “Canvas Feature: Microsoft Immersive Reader.”

Canvas Release Notes Available in Canvas

Last but definitely not least, Canvas has made it simpler to access their documentation about upcoming features. No longer do you need to have the Release Notes page on the Canvas website bookmarked – they’ve included the relevant links in the Canvas help menu! “Canvas Update: Release Notes Available in the Canvas Help Menu” has the full details on this change.

We couldn’t cover every post from this summer here, but that doesn’t mean the rest aren’t important or have useful information. If you’re curious about, say, how you can make sure you don’t miss posts in a Q&A forum or want to know more about Canvas’ new annotation assignments, check out the rest of the posts in our Summer 2021 tag.

We also invite you to share your experiences with us. Have you found some cool Canvas feature that changed how you do something in your course? Or maybe you figured out a strategy for teaching that’s more effective and your students have responded well to. Either way, we’d love to hear about it and help you share your story. Email us at ctl@cedarville.edu to get started.