In this new monthly series, I hope to introduce you to the exciting new features and/or enhancements that the Canvas development team added during the past month. If something catches your eye, feel free to come talk to us!
For more information, check out the release notes from 1/7 and 1/28.
Oh, the places Canvas will go! Here is a list of items that Instructure (the company that makes Canvas) plans to give us this year:
- Canvas Teacher App for mobile
- Better and more granular outcomes that can be applied to more items
- A completely overhauled Quizzes tool
- Expanded and clearer reporting
For Instructors and Students
- Announcements Display on your course homepage: This setting lets you add a box at the top of your course home page that would show recent announcements. You can specify how many announcements to show. This would be a great way for you to bring course announcements to your students’ attention (if they somehow did not receive emails for them).
- [Updated] Creating new group sets for group assignments: You can create a new group set when you create a new assignment, instead of going back into the Peoples page.
- [Updated] Repeating events in the Calendar tool: This wording has been updated to improve clarity.
- User interface: The default font and icons have been updated for both web and mobile.
- [Updated] Student quiz responses: This is a wording change, the feature itself has not be changed – if you release student responses after submissions, they do see which questions they answered incorrectly.
- PDF Annotations in Mobile App: Students can now annotate PDF files directly inside the the Canvas Mobile App (both iOS and Android), which can then be saved, shared (with another app), and/or submitted for an assignment. For example, this may be useful for worksheets.
Instructors Only
- Rich Content Editor: Pages and Files are now displayed alphabetically.
Students Only
- To Do List: past assignments are not longer displayed in the To Do list
- What-If Scores: what-if scores that you enter for muted assignments are now calculated in the total grade