Although official Choate policy only stipulates “major assignments and assessments,” the Academic Technology team and our partners in The Learning Center strongly recommend posting all assignments with their respective due dates in Canvas. This will set your students up for success because your assignments will appear on their Canvas Calendars and To-Do lists, allowing them to better visualize and prioritize their work, and it will ultimately make life easier for you as a teacher and adviser. If you ever need to change the due date for an assignment, you can simply drag it to a new date in your own Calendar and the change will be reflected everywhere. Finally, please ensure that any electronic readings, notes, or handouts are linked or attached to their respective assignments (which also automatically stores them in Files).
While using the Gradebook is also not required by school policy, we encourage you use it because it is fully integrated to your existing Canvas workflow, saving you precious time. Just ask any of your colleagues who have leaned in to Canvas — the more you treat Canvas as your hub for everything, the better experience you will have with it, and the more mental resources you’ll have available for your most impactful interpersonal interactions. (If you do choose to use the Gradebook, please be sure to hide totals in student grade summaries in order to comply with our school policy.)
When it comes to structuring and styling your courses, rest assured you have complete autonomy – Canvas is powerful and flexible enough that it can look and feel however you wish. That said, the shell courses distributed by your department heads are intentionally constructed with a minimalist aesthetic – almost all Course Navigation links except Home and Modules are disabled by default, with the Home page set to Syllabus so that if students navigate to your page, they see your course expectations and an auto-populated list of published assignments organized by due date. Any of your assignments can still use items that may be housed inside those hidden areas, but in almost all cases, you should treat such areas as your own space where you do not need to worry about how things appear to students. As long as an individual file, etc. is designated as “published,” it will be visible inside its respective assignment. Of course, if you would like to re-enable any of the Course Navigation links, you can easily do so in Settings.
Need some help getting started? Please head over to our Canvas Resources page, and mark your calendars for the two in-person Canvas workshops we’ll be holding during Opening Days:
-Wednesday, August 23 1:30-4pm in Elman (New Faculty only)
-Tuesday, August 29 3-5pm (All Faculty welcome)
