Canvas - Student Engagement
Announcements
Use the Canvas Announcements tool to share important information with all members of your course. Your announcement will appear in the tool itself as well as in the global and course activity feeds. Depending on their notification settings, members of your course may also receive a copy of the announcement via email, SMS text, or Canvas mobile app notification. Instructors may also schedule announcements in advance.
Canvas Announcements Resources
Collaborations
Canvas leverages Google Docs technology to allow multiple users (up to 50 collaborators) to work together on the same document at the same time. Collaborative documents are saved in real-time, meaning a change made by any of its users will be immediately visible to everyone.
Note: Google Docs allows you to add up to 50 users per collaboration, and all users can view and edit a document at the same time. However, Google collaborations has a limit as to the number of users who can access a collaboration at any time. Learn more about creating a Google Collaboration.
You can collaborate using a document, presentation, or spreadsheet.
Canvas Collaborations Resources
Conferences
Conferences are primarily used for virtual lectures, virtual office hours, and student groups. They can also be used to demonstrate technologies or troubleshoot technology issues online. Conferences can accommodate up to 50 people.
Conferences makes it easy to conduct synchronous (real-time) lectures for all of the students in your course. Conferences allows you to broadcast real-time audio, video, demo applications on your desktop, share presentation slides, or demo any online resources. Currently, Canvas integrates with BigBlueButton.
Recorded conferences are available for only 2 weeks.
Discussions
Canvas provides an integrated system for class discussions, allowing both instructors and students to start and contribute to as many discussion topics as desired. Discussions can also be created as an assignment for grading purposes (and seamlessly integrated with the Canvas Gradebook), or simply serve as a forum for topical and current events. Discussions can also be created within student groups.
- Help students start thinking about an upcoming Assignment or class discussion.
- Follow-up on a conversation or questions that began in a face-to-face classroom.
- Test student comprehension of important points made in class.
- Debate contradictory ideas.
- Brainstorm different approaches to a class problem.
Groups
Groups are like a smaller version of your course and are used as a collaborative tool where students can work together on group projects and assignments. Students can be organized into groups at the course level, and when allowed, students can create and control their own study groups.
Pages
Pages are where you can put content and educational resources that are part of your course but don’t necessarily belong in an assignment, or that you want to refer to in multiple assignments. This is a place where you can include text, video, and links to your files. You can even make links to other pages. Pages can also be used as a collaboration tool where you can create class wikis and set specific user access for each page. Canvas keeps the entire history of the page so you can see how it changes over time.
