5 Canvas tips every teacher should know

Here are 5 essential Canvas tips that all teachers should know about

Teachers and students spend a lot of time in Canvas. Reviewing my own institution’s yearly analytics, some of our professors spend thousands of hours in the LMS. With that said, there are always a few tips and tricks we can pick up, whether to make our workload more efficient or to enhance our content. Here is my list of tips that every teacher should know.

Undelete

I was fortunate to learn about the undelete feature many years ago. This little Canvas hack is all too often a best-kept secret (and an instructional designer’s best friend). If you delete an entire Canvas page, an announcement, an assignment, a discussion or quiz, etc., then all hope is not lost if you need to recover it. Simply type “undelete” after your course code in the URL. The URL will typically look something like:

[school].instructure.com/courses/[your course]/undelete

Smash that restore button and revel in your magical powers of resurrection.

Styled tables

The default Canvas tables are something scary, but there is some incredibly simple code that will rejuvenate that content. I wrote an entire blog post dedicated to styling tables, and covered some additional options for those who are willing to tinker a little with the CSS code. It might be worth your time.

https://www.howtocanvas.com/create-amazing-pages-in-canvas/tables

Embedded content

This is another topic that I have blogged about in the past. I even gave an InstructureCon presentation demonstrating techniques and strategies for embedding content like a pro. Often our LMS (and school) experience is a silo’ed experience. Canvas is hosted on the internet, but our classes don’t feel like they take advantage of the richness of what the internet has to offer. There are many reasons for this - policy, FERPA, pedagogy techniques, etc. However, learning to embed content is like opening the door to the internet. We can still house our students but invite content from the outside to enhance our course content.

https://www.howtocanvas.com/create-amazing-pages-in-canvas/embedding-content

Floating images

By default, when you add an image to your Canvas page, it will sit on the left side of the screen, right above and below blocks of text with ample white space to the side (unless the image spans the entire width of the page). However, it is possible to float the picture to the right side of the screen and allow the text to fill in the space to the left. I have used this technique several times already in this very blog post!

We don’t have to settle for images being positioned where Canvas puts them. With minimal CSS, we can float it to the right. Here is the code I used on the Canvas page for the tutorial:

<img style="float: right; margin-left: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px;" 
  src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1544717305-2782549b5136?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=Mnw3NjA3NHwwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fHN0dWRlbnR8ZW58MXx8fHwxNjQxODM1NjEy&ixlib=rb-1.2.1&q=80&w=1080" 
  alt="smiling woman standing while holding orange folder" width="250" height="375" />

You can also float the image to the left instead of the right. In that case, you would probably want to put margin to the right instead of the left.

Redirect tool

You can create your own customized course navigation menu item, even linking to content outside of Canvas. You can determine not only the link but also the custom text for the link. You can determine if the link content populates right inside Canvas or if it opens a new tab. From an instructional design standpoint, it is often a best practice to keep students within the Canvas learning environment as much as possible, but there may be times when you want to navigate away.

The redirect tool is an app found in your course settings and it is easy to install and configure. Often teachers use this as a way to introduce students to universal resource centers or other tools that facilitate teaching and learning in Canvas.

And those are my 5 essential Canvas tips that I think you should know!

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