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Canvas News

#wdmcsonline

Canvas News#wdmcsonline

PLCs & Canvas

There are many ways that Canvas can be a very useful tool in your classroom, but did you consider all the ways Canvas can be a great addition to the work in your PLCs? With the ability to create your own courses, you can create a PLC course and add your fellow PLC members as teachers. Then, collaborate with each other to build a lesson, assessment, or assignment that can be imported into each of your courses.


Some Curriculum Leads are also supporting their PLCs Canvas integration by building blueprint courses and common homepages (see teacher spotlight below for more info). As we continue to add our curriculum standards into Canvas, you will have the ability to create rubrics tied to your outcomes and provide students with feedback specific to those standards. This data will also be able to guide your PLC work to better support those students that need a differentiated path.

Important Canvas Updates & Info

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Rearrange Class Tiles

You now have the ability to rearrange the class tiles on your Canvas Dashboard. Just hover over the class tile, click, and drag it to the new spot. The other tiles will move to make room.
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Transition to HTML5

Those of you that have used video or audio in your Canvas course will no longer have to enable Flash Player. The rich content editor now uses HTML5 to better communicate with Chrome.
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Canvas Gradebook & IC Passback

Close to the beginning of 2nd semester we will begin the process of syncing the Canvas gradebook with your Infinite Campus gradebook. If you are using Learning Mastery Gradebook, the outcomes will not sync with Infinite Campus, you will continue to follow the same process as before.
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Turning off Classroom

January 14 will be the last day you will be able to access Google Classroom. Canvas offers many of the same features and access to Google Drive. I would be happy to meet with you to support you in your transition from Classroom to Canvas. Please email me if interested.
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Canvas Student & Teacher Apps

A recent Canvas study showed 90% of students were accessing coursework through the Canvas app; 48% reported working through the app several times a week & 37% reported accessing it daily. Have you considered how your course looks in the app version of Canvas? Did you know you have a teacher app for Canvas and can create content and grade from your smartphone? Click here to learn more about Canvas mobile.
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Preview Content

Canvas has now updated the Commons feature to allow teachers to be able to preview the type of content being shared in a lesson on Commons before downloading it to their courses. You still cannot see details, specific questions, directions, etc. but can see names/amounts of pages, quizzes, discussions, & assignments.

Teacher Spotlight

Sarah Petersen & Rebecca Abraham, Visual Arts & World Languages Curriculum Leads

Sarah has worked with her Elementary Art PLC to develop common grade level units and rubrics. This Canvas page is used by teachers to easily access shared resources. The Art Challenges for Students page was developed by Christie Engelbert and Sarah to provide extended opportunities for students to use outside of the scheduled classroom time. Both projects are a work in progress, as the PLC continues to grow and learn.


Rebecca and the Elementary Spanish Team created blueprint courses in Canvas for each of their grade levels. Blueprint courses are master courses that can be associated with your student courses and will sync curriculum to any course associated with it. This helps to easily share assessments and resources for all units and guarantee consistency throughout the program. Each teacher still has the ability to edit their individual student courses. The PLC has very limited time to meet as a group, so Canvas streamlines their collaboration process.


If you want to learn more about how you can use Canvas as a PLC, reach out to Carrie, the Online Learning Coordinator.

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Elementary Art Common Units

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Art Challenges for Students

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Elementary Spanish Blueprint Courses

Want to learn more about Canvas?

Online Canvas Training
Be sure to Create an Account with your @wdmcs.org email to review options for webinars.
Sign up for Canvas Staff Development
Carrie and Abby are offering Canvas courses again this spring. Integrating Canvas is for those just getting started with using Canvas and Advanced Canvas is for those ready to move from simple integration of your lessons to a full redefinition.