Canvas LMS Tutorial - Setting the Homepage

in this video tutorial I'm gonna show you how to set up a home page in canvas a home page that's more than or different than this look that we have here right now in this course if my students go to the home page or if I go to the home page this is what they'll see and this might be acceptable you might like the look of this as the first thing that your students see when they enter your course but if you don't if you want something different something more that's what this tutorial is for hopefully you've already watched my canvas tutorial on building a course using modules if you haven't I highly recommend that you watch that before watching this one so what I have here is three modules one that's completely blank and then two others that have some content this has a page it has an assignment and it has a discussion this second unit has a quiz with a very interesting name and then it has an assignment and discussion so I've got some content here that's starting to come together this is a course that my students are going to be able to learn from however I would like to dress up the home page a little bit so what I would recommend is that you go to pages now so far I've done all of the building just right here inside of modules okay I'm on this modules tab here and that's where I've done all the building but for right now I'm gonna switch to pages and when I go to pages it's going to show the one page that I've created well I would like to create another page so I'll click Add page and I'll call this Spanish to course home page and you can see here below I have a text editor that I can click and I can start typing text now whatever I type here is what the students will see every time they sign into my course so you might want to think about making this look welcoming look good I probably should be typing this in Spanish but that's okay so give me a minute to type in some nice information for the students to see and then I'll resume the tutorial okay great now I would like to add a little bit more visual flair to this page because look if I save this you can see how amazing it looks I mean it's just plain and a little bit boring at this point so I'll click edit to get back in and this time I'm gonna add an image and this will be my course image and I made this image using adobe spark post if you're not familiar with adobe spark post you should watch my other video tutorial on that tool it is really good for making banners for courses and all sorts of other things posters flyers things like that so check out that video tutorial but with very little hassle very little work I made this banner and I have saved it to my computer so now here inside of canvas I'm just gonna click where I want that banner to appear and I'll go to images upload a new image choose file and I'm gonna go to my downloads folder that's where I downloaded it to and I'll select it and after selecting it I have to click upload and then it's gonna pull in that banner and put it at the top of my page so now if I save this page this is what it looks like I think that adds a nice touch and a nice feel to this course okay at this point I'm gonna edit it one more time because I want you to see that you could do a lot more here I could put in my name I could put in my phone I could put in a picture of me here and make it so that the students know how to contact me maybe not phone maybe just email address come to think of it but anyway I could put in some contact information and then here I could put in the names of the different modules in my course and to do this I'm gonna switch from paragraph - maybe header 3 and I'll just call this unit number 1 the family and then I'll hit enter unit number to the home and you probably noticed look it didn't keep the heading font size that I wanted and so to avoid that let me show you a little trick after typing in my first bit of text there instead of hitting Enter or return on the keyboard I can hold shift and tap Enter or return and then notice what it does it kept the same font size but not only that but it actually keeps the text closer together so instead of just hitting Enter or return just hold shift Enter or return and then you can type it and continue to type the way you want to do so those are my three units so far if I were really going to use this with my students I would type in all of the unit numbers for my whole school year but you could also do it gradually now if I save it let's look at what this is looking like so far this is coming together I think pretty well I've got some nice visuals and I could add more let's pretend like I've got my name phone number picture here you know that's helpful and welcoming to the students but I wish that this wasn't just a list of units in the course I wish it were useful well look if I edit again I can go in and highlight text in this case unit 1 the family and I can hyperlink to something so I could hyperlink to a website I could hyperlink to all sorts of things but in this case I just want a hyperlink to module 1 so with that selected over here on the right I can go to links and there it says modules and I'll just choose unit 1 the family and so now that will be a hyperlink I'll choose unit 2 for the home and unit 3 for the neighborhood ok I'll save that and look what we have our home page is really coming along great if I click on that now it takes me directly to the unit 1 now some of you are noticing it also takes me to unit 2 and that's true but that's just because right now I only have the two units imagine that I had 15 different units what this is doing is it's a shortcut to take the students to the modules page yes but it's to the part of the page that they will need so unit 2 again it seems to take them to the same place but it really is serving a purpose it's taking them where they need to go to see what they need to see so this home page is awesome the only downside look when I click home it doesn't take me to the home page it's taking me still to the modules so watch these steps this is a little tricky it's a little unintuitive but I'm gonna go in two pages here at the left and I'm gonna say that this page is a special page ok and first of all I should publish it there are several places where I could have published it but I had neglected to publish so I fixed that now it's published so now I need to differentiate it from the rest of these pages this one and others that will come in the future I need to set it aside set it apart because it is special it's the home page so over here at the right there's a gear and I click on the gear symbol and I choose use as front page so that is now a special page meant to be the home page or front page so now I'm gonna click home and it'll be there right no it's not there there's one more step and that's why I say it's not very intuitive the last step is here on the home page I need to go where it says choose home page click there and there are five or six different options that I have and the one that I want is this one pages front page so basically which page was set as the front page whatever that was that's what's gonna be the home page I click Save and once that saves it takes me to the home page and there it is this is the home page of my course now and it's got links that take the student in to the actual content when they're ready to get it so that is much better so that is really what I do recommend for people that are building a new course in canvas that's what I do in my classes but there are some other options that you have here course modules is the default so you've already seen that and what that looks like assignments list let's look at what that looks like if you change it to be assignments list this is what they'll see it just takes them basically to the things that give them points in the course and so some people might like that personally I don't want them to focus just on points syllabus is another one that's similar to that it brings in everything in the order of when it's due so everything that's worth points in the order in which it's due that's course syllabus and you can also go to course Activity Stream so that would list things like announcements from the teacher notifications things like that so out of all of these options I've used syllabus I've used course modules and I've used pages front page and this is by far my favorite pages front page so I'll save that and stick with that so I hope this video tutorial has been useful to you thanks for watching and please consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Twitter Facebook and Pinterest and please do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and please click like on the video if you liked it and watch for a new video at least every Monday

Channel: Technology for Teachers and Students

Views: 200,826

Rating: 4.9708881 out of 5

Keywords: canvas lms, canvas homepage, canvas home page, canvas homepage setup, how to set up canvas homepage, canvas lms homepage, canvas lms home page, canvas l.m.s., canvas pages, canvas lms pages, canvas lms tutorial, canvas homepage tutorial, tutorial for canvas home pages, homepage options in canvas, how to change canvas homepage

Id: p6xmxgyVPdM

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2017