All aboard the Canvas Train - P. Fefles & C. Petropulos

All aboard the Canvas Train

    When I found out last spring that I would be co teaching freshman academic English with Chrissi Petropulos this year, I was excited about the prospect of experimenting with technology in our classroom.  To start the year, all of our incoming freshmen would have one to one devices, so the excuse of not needing to learn how to use Canvas was no longer valid.  When Chrissi and I met over the summer to discuss our partnership, we decided to go all in with Canvas.  We didn’t want to simply host documents in an organized manner.  No, that would not suffice!  We wanted to test that bad boy out to see what it could do!

    In theory, this seemed like it should be relatively easy.   I like to think of myself as being relatively tech savvy.   I thought how hard can it be?  Besides, how great would it be to go almost paperless?  There would be no more stacks of paper to grade!  You can count me in!  Plus, the second guessing of myself that I used to experience when a student would ask about an assignment that they claimed I lost - GONE!  Canvas would keep track of all submitted assignments for me: time stamped and everything!

    When it came to practice though, the transition hasn’t been nearly as seamless as I’d hoped.    Thank goodness for our TIF’s, because the first few weeks with Canvas were a struggle.  The simplest things weren’t working out for us.  First, came the dilemma as to how to set up our classes together.  Because these are co taught classes, Chrissi has a roster for “her” kids and I have a roster for “mine” (even though there is no “her” or “mine” in our class).   Do we try to merge our rosters or keep them separated?  Somehow, we ended up merging one but not the other.  We did not know that this would negatively affect our ability to port over grades to Skyward (one of the key perks to using Canvas).  After attempting to fix this on my own (unsuccessfully), I called for reinforcements.  Crisis averted!!

     With our rosters fixed, I felt confident that we were ready to release our first assignment to the students.  We created our assignments as Google docs.  You can create them as Word docs, but it seems easier to just have the students make a copy of the Google document and type directly on it.   Unfortunately, I forgot to make sure that the link we provided our students was shared properly and actually worked. Needless to say, I recommend walking through the entire submission process with your classes - multiple times if needed!  

   From a Special Education teacher’s perspective, this is a fantastic organizational tool.  The calendar function allows us to share important due dates.  If our students ignore their calendar (which most do) there is a to do list located in the top right corner of their main page that lists assignments and due dates.  Our students often struggle with losing papers:  assignments, notes, etc. often end up at the bottom of a school bag in a crumpled mess.  With Canvas, as long as students have access to the internet, they have access to copies of their materials for class.  Plus, with online submission, I know before class starts who has turned in their homework and who hasn’t.  

     Since the beginning of the year, we have overcome many obstacles with Canvas.  We have had issues with grades not porting over to Skyward, not being able to edit student assignments, students not being able to see the comments that were made, and the Crocodoc software not allowing us to see assignments that had been previously submitted.  Through it all, I feel as though the negatives we’ve dealt with are greatly outweighed by the potential of this program.  Is it foolproof?  Hardly.  But I feel as though we have barely scratched the surface with its capabilities.

Peter Fefles Chrissi Petropulos
Carl Sandburg Carl Sandburg
Special Education Teacher English Teacher
Twitter: @cshfefles Twitter: @MrsPetrop