Canvas Updates

Owned by Rob Caldwell
Last updated: Oct 08, 2024
6 min read

This page will keep you informed about recent modifications and enhancements to the Canvas Learning Management System that may impact your teaching experience. Check back regularly for the most current information and how these changes can benefit your teaching and your students' learning.

Khanmigo Teacher Tools

(Added to Canvas October 6, 2024)

Khan Academy’s new AI teacher assistant Khanmigo has been integrated with the NCSSM Canvas account.

Khanmigo provides more than 20 teaching activities. Easily create rubrics, exit tickets, lesson plans, multiple choice quizzes, and more with the Khanmigo AI teacher assistant.

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You should now see a “Khanmigo Teacher Tools” link in each of your Canvas course navigation menus. Students cannot see this link; it is only visible by teachers.

After clicking the link, you can create a Khanmigo account using your NCSSM Google account to access the teacher tools.

Editing Assignment Due Dates - User Interface Change

Canvas recently changed the user interface for editing assignment due dates.

At the top of every assignment, there is now an “Assign to” button.

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Clicking this button will slide open a window with options to assign specific students, groups of students, or sections, and add due dates and availability dates to assignment.

The addition of the new “Assign to” button allows you to edit due dates without the need of editing the rest of the assignment details.

While editing an assignment, you can also open the due dates window by clicking the “Manage Due Dates and Assign To” link at the bottom of the assignment editing screen.

Editing Assignment Due Dates in Bulk

Canvas recently added the ability to edit assignment due dates in bulk. This is useful if you imported a previous course into a new shell and forgot to shift due dates when importing. This can also be useful if you need to shift all assignment due dates a week or two due to a change in schedule.

Guide to Editing due dates in bulk

Canvas Discussions Redesign

This enhancement aims to improve teachers’ and students’ experiences by offering new customizations and interactive components to discussion forums, including @mentions, anonymous posting, post logging, and enhanced searching and sorting capabilities, and discussion summaries. The ability to set multiple due dates for checkpoints is coming in a future update.

One of the most noticeable changes is the absence of the “edit” button. In order to add discussion prompts and other instructions for students, teachers must now use the kebab more menu to locate the edit feature.

We realize that change can be hard, so to ensure a smooth transition and help you make the most of these new features, we have prepared the following resources:

  1. Instructional Video: This brief video provides an overview of the new features and changes that users can expect to see in the Discussions Redesign. You can watch it here.

  2. Two-Page Guide: This concise document explains which features have changed, and includes tips to assist you in leveraging the new features effectively.

  3. User Guides: We have created detailed “How-To” user guides for both the student and teacher roles. You can find supplemental resources for those using the Canvas Student (iOS/Android) and Canvas Teacher (iOS/Android) apps as well. 

Discussion Summaries

The Discussions feature in Canvas is a powerful tool to facilitate conversation and collaboration between students. But we know it can be challenging for educators to keep up with threaded discussions, especially those with larger classes. That's where discussion summaries can help – they accelerate educators' ability to grasp central themes and questions emerging from discussion threads, understand student engagement, and identify areas that warrant further conversation.

 

The Discussion summary feature utilizes AI to generate a summary that can help clarify topic areas that may need further discussion or clarification.

 

Privacy and Technical Information about Discussion Summaries

 

Selective Release of Modules 

Educators can differentiate learning content for students by releasing modules to specific individuals and sections. This will allow you to personalize your course more and assign specialized modules to individual students or groups of students. You can also assign different modules to different sections in the same course.

More information about selective release of modules

Course-wide Smart Search

Searching for content in a Canvas course has been very challenging in the past. Due to this, we have enabled an AI-assisted search tool that can be used to search an entire Canvas course for pages, assignments, and other content.

 

 

Use Smart Search to type in keyword(s), content, or just give a general gist of what you are looking for (“guitar”, “what are the steps of photosynthesis?”, “math to turn a function into frequencies“). We think you will be surprised at how well the system understands the intent of your queries and returns results accordingly.

 

Privacy and Technical Information about Smart Search

Improved Lucid Integration

Lucid products, such as Lucidchart and Lucidspark, are now seamlessly integrated into Canvas to enhance student learning by facilitating collaborative visual thinking and interactive diagramming. These tools enable students to create and share dynamic visual content, and promote engagement and deeper understanding of complex concepts.

Lucid Spark is a good replacement for Google Jamboard.

Learn more about how to use Lucid with Canvas

 

DesignPLUS Enhancements

DesignPLUS is a course design toolset that augments Canvas' built-in editing features to allow the user to customize and style content in Canvas more easily. It allows for more advanced formatting and features, such as pull-down menus, buttons, icons, quick checks, etc. It is not necessary for faculty to learn to use DesignPLUS, but for those who wish to augment their design, a site license is available to all NCSSM employees.

DesignPLUS is recommended for more advanced Canvas users who are already familiar with Canvas' basic classroom functionality.

For teachers using DesignPLUS, the product has gone through substantial changes recently.

Learn more about the new DesignPLUS enhancements and changes

 

Rubric Enhancements - Coming soon …

The process of creating rubrics in canvas was never very intuitive. We have enabled enhancements to the rubric creation process to make the process easier. The guides below detail the changes.