School Canvas Template

The 2020-2021 school year saw a district wide rollout of Canvas as our LMS. The transition from Powerschool Learning to Canvas was planned well before the school shutdown, but making this shift while students were at home put extra obstacles in the path.

Feedback from students and their families indicated that many people were struggling to navigate the many Canvas pages needed for success at school. Chief among the frustrations were:

- Different locations for daily content on each class' page

- Challenging to go back and identify work that students were missing

- Difficult to locate contact information for the teachers

When surveying staff about their implementation of Canvas, they had a completely different set of frustrations. The school district rollout did include some initial training and a vague template to start with, but teachers felt it wasn't enough.

- Teachers were spending hours creating pages and hyperlinking them.

- Students were not accessing their work, claiming they "couldn't find it," despite many explanations of the procedures.

- As one teacher adroitly summarized, "I am a teacher, not a web designer." Teachers expressed that the constant creating and formatting was exhausting and overwhelming.

- Teachers who taught on A/B Day schedules expressed that students were consistently confused about which day students have their classes.

In a response to the concerns of all stakeholders, I brought it to our school admin team that we needed a more cohesive template for the following school year. After combining all the feedback and surveying staff about layout preferences, I developed 2 separate template options for the 2021-2022 school year. Both templates have matching homepages.

The differences between the templates can be found on the weekly pages.

Teachers were able to choose between Version 1 or Version 2 and then import them from Canvas Commons. They were able to import the templates into the courses automatically created by our SIS. All pages for all weeks in the school year were already created and hyperlinked to simplify the teacher work load.

There were concerns about use of a template removing autonomy from the teachers. The compromise was that teachers are allowed to change formatting such as color, font, and images, but all the buttons must stay in the same place and say the same thing. Some strong examples of teachers making the template their own can be seen below.