P-CCS Canvas Best Practices

As we enter our second year with Canvas as our district’s learning management system, it’s important to continue to have it serve as the digital centerpiece for our classrooms. In an effort to foster a more uniform experience for our students and families, staff are encouraged to construct and maintain their Canvas courses bearing in mind these P-CCS Canvas Best Practices.

If you have questions or would like assistance implementing any of these practices, please consider attending a “WorkLab” session on Thursday, August 26 during Canvas Camp or one of the Canvas Q & A sessions on either Thursday, August 26th or Monday, August 30th.

Finally, know your friendly, district Technology Integration Specialists will also plan sessions for each of these items during the first six weeks of school (and sessions will be recorded and posted) as embracing these best practices will help our students.

Canvas Camp 2021

Pack your bags for Canvas Camp! Join your Technology Integration Specialists for Canvas sessions heading into the new school year. We will be offering a variety of sessions:

  • Worklabs: Set aside some time to work on your Canvas course with Matt and Kaelyn available to assist. Set a goal for your worktime and join breakout rooms with others working on the same thing: home page set up, organizing modules, or getting back to the basics of setting up your course. Elementary and Secondary sessions offered. Join virtually or come to the Tanger Media Center.
  • Studio and Canvas Q & A sessions with Canvas trainers (limit of 30 virtual participants)
  • Course Design Considerations with a Canvas trainer (limit of 50 virtual participants). Topics include course home page design, organizing modules, and setting up assignments in a more user-friendly way.
  • Tech Integrationist Face-Off: Canvas Tips: Watch Matt and Kaelyn showdown about their favorite tips and features of Canvas.

SCECHs are available for attendance. Interact with the image below (click the + button) for more details and to add the sessions to your Google Calendar click here.

 

Canva for Education…Now District-Wide!

I’m pleased to share that we’ve recently launched Canva for Education district-wide! Canva makes it easy to create, collaborate, and communicate visually – in the classroom and beyond. If you’ve never heard of Canva for Education, you can learn more about the tool here.

With Canva for Education, you can create classroom decor kits, Canvas buttons & banners, education presentations, lesson plans, worksheets, reports, posters, and more. You can empower your students through authentic assessments and tasks, enabling them to create beautiful, real-world deliverables quickly and easily. You can use Canva for student assignments and enable real-time collaboration on Canva projects. Students can turn-in these projects and you can embed your designs easily with the Canvas integration.

Everyone with a district email address will receive all the benefits of Canva for Education, including all of Canva’s “pro” features, at no cost and with no validation or application required. You can log in to our new Canva district team with your district credentials at www.canva.com and you can also find it in the waffle.

Please take some time to review this teacher onboarding guide from the team at Canva. We encourage everyone to review these materials, as there are some aspects of the district Canva platform that will differ from what you may be used to if you’ve already used Canva. If you already have a Canva account under your district email address it’s especially important to pay attention to the pages that have to do with logging in, switching teams, and copying files. You can view just those pages here.

If you have any questions about Canva, or would like to learn more about using Canva in the classroom, you can contact a Tech Integration Specialist by submitting a ticket. There are also lots of great resources available at designschool.canva.com.  

See additional resources below.