T U T O R I A L : Design and Customize a Canvas Course

[Music] hello everyone welcome back to my channel if you are new here my name is ashley guerrero and i am a fourth grade teacher in north texas i am extremely passionate about technology and helping teachers integrate it seamlessly into their classroom today's video is going to be full of tips and tricks on how to set up your very first canvas course canvas is a learning management system that my district uses previously we used google classroom and when we switched to online learning when covid first started we actually started using canvas then at first i hated it i was terrified of it it looked overwhelming and i wanted to go back to the good old tried and true google classroom because that's what i knew however i have realized that canvas is truly a power house it can integrate apps you can basically kids don't even have to leave canvas to do anything it's it can be all embodied right there within the actual course so today's video is just going to be an introduction we're going to talk about setting up a course adding some customization features i do plan to create other videos eventually but this one was highly requested in just setting up your course and how to add that customization to it to make it a little bit easier and even just more aesthetically pleasing for your students don't forget to click the subscribe button and the notification bell to be reminded of any future videos i post and without further ado let's get started hello everyone i am going to be showing you today how i set up a canvas course i will also be showing you some ways that you can customize your homepage as well as how i add assignments and discussions how i organize my modules and then also how you can help ease the use of the navigation bar by taking out certain things that you don't think your students will need access to as well as how to add a course card which are these little tiles that you see on my home page and how you can integrate google apps so even though this is going to be an in-depth video this is going to be more of an introductory video to get you started there is so many features to canvas that it would take me a very long time to explain all of them so the thing that i love about canvas is you can create a course and not have any students in it and just play around and practice adding assignments and practice adding discussions so don't be afraid to play around but other than that let's get started designing our very first canvas course all right so the very first thing you're going to want to do is click on start a new course then go ahead and give your course name a title if you're not sure what to name it you can just go ahead and name it practice course you can always change the name later if you want to give your course a short name you can or you can also just leave it blank so an example of a short name i would just abbreviate practice course to pc and then i could put hey ashley g and then the content license i just leave it as is and then click create course before we begin i want to give you a frame of reference and show you what my course looked like for the 2020 end of the school year whenever we started online learning so this is what my home page looked like so when students clicked on this course from their dashboard they would see this little welcome sign as well as my instructions and i made these clickable buttons to take them to the various modules and i just chose to organize it that way because i felt like that was easier for them to navigate rather than going to modules and clicking on the modules that way so then you can also hyperlink images so this was a book and it was my partner teacher reading allowed our chapter book tuck everlasting and then i also had pages linked for enrichment and helpful resources and tools for them to use during online learning you'll also see along the left hand side that i turned off various pages or tools along the navigation bar this just means that students cannot see it so i feel like it kind of helps to declutter their view and gives them less to look at whenever they are on the home page and then you can actually add your own custom links and i'll show you how to do that as well so before we begin designing our homepage i feel like it's really crucial for you to understand how things are organized within canvas so your modules that's basically your main hub of where your assignments and everything like that will fall under i like to think of modules as units so our curriculum is divided up into units and we usually have about 10 units in elar and 10 units in social studies so as an example when you click add module you'll want to name it so again think modules are units so i'm going to name this instead of module because my fourth graders didn't know what modules were i am going to name this unit 1 and let's say it's introduction to readers workshop now i'm going to click add module and so now that is a unit where i can add assignments under so you have a collapsible down arrow that once you start adding units you can close it to help declutter everything else that's underneath it but for now we're going to leave it down so that way we can add files and assignments and things like that so on the left hand side you have a publish icon so this means that right now your students if you already have them added cannot see it our district already pre-loads our students for us so we are very blessed with not having to go in and manually add students but there are lots of tutorials out there if you'll just google search how to add students manually in canvas and things like that so just so when you're ready to publish you will click the publish button right here the plus button is where you can add all sorts of assignments quizzes files pages discussions text headers urls external tools so on and so forth and then your three dots right here this is where you can edit this module you can move contents around and you can also even share modules to what's called the commons and this is where your district people with inside your district can pull various courses and lessons and units that you've already designed and pull it into their course all right so let's start with a text header let's say we are gonna add this text header right here and we're just gonna call this lesson one and let's name this building a reading life okay and then i'm going to click add item and so that's all that does you can't click on it it doesn't take you anywhere it's just a header that kind of helps you break up your assignments and things like that and again you just have to before you start designing think of how you want your course organized maybe your course isn't organized by units maybe you want it to be done weekly so maybe this could be week one's assignments or even monthly and then break it up that way that's the the biggest piece of advice i can give when you're starting off is to think about how would i want to organize my course and what's going to be best for my students all right so now that i have that text header i then can add an assignment a quiz a file a page discussion so on and so forth most of the time right after a text header it's usually a page because this is where i'm going to add some type of message or introduction maybe a list of things that we are going to complete um so on and so forth so when you click add a new page i will then say introduction to lesson one and i'm actually going to say introduction to lesson one unit one actual or you can say unit one lesson one however you prefer and the reason why if i were to just say introduction to lesson one when i am now adding other units if i were to say introduction to lesson one again it's going to copy over that the content from that page so i want to make sure that unit one lesson one that won't repeat again because lesson one only belongs in that unit if that makes sense so then you can also change the indentation i like to indent one level so that it looks different from the text header let me show you what i mean so when you click add item you see how it pushed it over just a little bit if you click on these three dots and you click decrease indent you can see that it goes back over to the left and lines up more with that text header so i like it to be over just a little bit because it kind of gives that hierarchy of this is a text header and then this is the order you're going to work in all right so this is all i'm going to build for now because i don't want to spend too much time on this i really want to show you how to set up your homepage to get students over here without having to click on modules and at any point this is also another feature i love of canvas when you go back home to your course homepage you can always click student view which is right here on the right hand side and so you can see exactly what it is that students see so it kind of gives you this pink outline it's and it's saying this is a test student view so right now everything along the left hand side that is what my students can see now you can see that modules is turned off so my students cannot see to click on modules which depending on the age of your students may be helpful maybe not right now since i don't have any buttons to take them to those modules it's that's going to be extremely difficult for them to access any of the content so let me show you what i mean i'm going to click leave student view and so you can see right here on my teacher end the visibility of the modules is turned off so i'm going to go down to settings i'm going to click navigation [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh and so actually i made a mistake i couldn't figure out why modules it shows that it's enabled anything that's disabled is down here but it showed that modules was enabled and so i was like maybe if i just drag it to the top and kind of change where it's located the visibility will turn back on well no it's still turned off so i'm actually going to go to my dashboard and publish my course to see if that changes things [Music] [Applause] so it still did not so again just keep playing around maybe it's because i need to publish my actual module so i'm going to click publish let's go back to our home page and there it is so now the eye has gone away so if you're running into that problem um just kind of troubleshoot is it because you need to publish your course is your module not published i still actually have a learning curve with this platform because this was introduced to us right at the start of online learning so i'm still learning as i go so thank you for learning along with me just now so let's get back to designing our course page our home page so right now like i said when you go home this is uh it's kind of setting the modules as the default as the home page so let's change that and let's actually add a welcome page so along the left hand side you're going to click on pages and then we're going to click add a page and i'm just going to name this home page i'm gonna name it homepage one all right so you'll want to design an image and i am going to do this inside of google draw so i'm gonna go to new more and then google drawings you can totally design this in powerpoint or whatever other design software you would like and i am just going to name this welcome sign and then i'm going to go ahead and insert a text box and i'm going to type out the word welcome i'm going to center it and i'm going to change the font to love you like a sister change the size of it just a little bit let's see all right and then i also want to add it again but kind of just in a fun cursive font so i'm going to insert another text box and let's change this to homemade apple and let's see what that looks like and i may want to keep looking at fonts trying out different cursive fonts oh i think i like that one let's see i like to play around so don't mind me for a second i actually think i like that one the best so i'm just going to add it underneath just to give it you know just a little bit more creative flair and i am going to hold down the shift button and select the other text box as well and then i'm going to go to arrange and then group and i'm going to move the group up and position it at the very top and now i'm going to change the colors just a little bit so i'm going to highlight all of this welcome text and i'm going to go to my text color i'm going to click on custom and i like to do just sort of a rainbow fun gradient effect so i'm going to change all of them to orange first and the reason why i do all of them as orange is because when i go back and i highlight the next color it already has it in the same position that i want so all i have to do is slide the hue slider so now i'm going to do more of a yellow and then i can do more of a green more of a blue or aqua turquoise now more of a blue purple i guess that one's more purple there we go so cute and now i want to add a drop shadow to both of these so i am going to go to format and then format options and then i'm going to click drop shadow and i am going to turn down the transparency just a little bit increase the distance just a little bit adjust the angle just play around and get it how you like it there's no right or wrong way to add a drop shadow and then yeah i think i like it like that all right and then you can right click on the canvas of google draw and change the background i'm just going to give it a white background since that's what the canvas page already is all right and then the next step is pretty important you don't want to leave this image this big because all of this white space will then show up on your canvas page as well so use this little handle down here where the triangle where the lines are that make that triangle and drag it up to crop your canvas size so you can even select both of these and slide it as much as you can over to the left and up so that way you're using as little space as possible so that way you can see i'm bringing in the canvas and coming up just a little bit as well beautimus all right now you can do one of two things you can either download it as an image or what i have found is pretty easy is to just click file and then publish to the web and you want it to you can just leave it as medium and then click publish click ok and then now you're going to command c or right click and copy or control copy it depends on what type of computer you're working on now you want to go back over to your course i'm going to go ahead and align to the center then i'm going to click on embed image and then i'm going to paste that url right here and you can see it automatically comes up with the dimensions then you can click update and there is now your cute little welcome banner so for right now i'm just going to write insert text here with instructions for students just for now so i can show you what this looks like whenever it is set as our homepage so you're going to click save and publish all right so now you're going to click on the three dots next to home page one and you're going to click use as front page you can see the little front page banner pops up next to it so now we're going to click home and now we need to click choose home page and then you're going to click pages front page and then click save so cute so now when you click on student view this is what your students are greeted with when they come to your course and just a little tip i actually created a folder in my google drive called canvas and then i added a folder called buttons and so everything that i create in google draw i leave here so that way i know that i don't accidentally delete it or anything like that because if you do choose the option of publish to the web and then you delete that google drawing that url to that picture will no longer work so if you do choose that option you don't want to delete the button that you actually designed or the image that you actually designed all right so now i'm going to show you how you can add little buttons right here that will take your students to the modules again when you go to student view you can teach your students just to simply click on modules and then they will see the various units give it a second to load you'll see the various units right here um but then again you can also if you want it to you could be as that's the thing i love about canvas you can be as creative or as simple as you want me i love being creative and using that as my outlet so i just choose to be a little extra sometimes all right so i'm going to click edit and then i'm going to go ahead and delete these instructions that i typed and i am actually going to insert a table and so i'm going to insert the table and for now i'm just going to do three by one and then i'm actually going to click on table properties and then for the border i'm going to change it to zero and then click ok so you can see how it now is a dashed line that means that the table outline won't show up on your home page all right and then i'm going to go ahead and highlight all three of these and change the alignment for it to be the center and then i'm also going to click on table properties and align the table to the center as well and then click ok all right so now i'm in a new google draw and i'm actually going to just go ahead and set this page up by going to file page setup and i'm going to click custom and i'm going to do three inches by one inches and click apply all right now i am going to add a rounded rectangle and i'm just going to click and drag and then you can use this little yellow diamond to change how rounded your buttons are or um the just the the radius of the corner on the rectangle so i'm going to leave it about there and then i am actually going to go back to custom and i'm going to slide these up just a little bit and i could go back and copy the exact same hex code from this orange and that's actually what i'm going to do so i'll show you how to do that so just click on custom again and i'm going to click copy and then go back and paste it here because i like all the colors to tie in nicely and then i am going to turn the border off and i'm going to give this one a drop shadow as well so i'm going to go to format and then format options and give it a drop shadow i'm gonna turn down the blur radius a little bit adjust the angle all right that looks good and then i now need to add text on top of this shape so i'm just going to drag the text box over and then i am going to change the font color to white actually we'll keep it black and i'm going to use an easy to read font so i will use century gothic and then i will name this unit one and again i like to just add a little creative twist to the things i designed so i'm just going to add a shape right here and i'm actually going to give it that same orange color and turn off the border so it kind of looks like that shape was cutting through like it looks like there's something was erased between it and then i am going to add another text box and this time i am going to write unit or type unit 1 but in cursive i sped this part up but i wanted to still include it in case you wanted some inspiration for designing your button [Music] [Music] all right change of plans you can see that i actually changed the bigger font to be the cursive and then i made the rectangle that is over the font a little bit smaller and i chose a really thin simple font to go in the middle again you totally do not have to do all of this this is just me wanting to play around and be a little bit more creative i also am going to add a drop shadow to the text inside of the shape all right so now i'm just going to name this google drawing unit buttons and so that way with all the other units that i design i can just do file make a copy so i'm not having to reformat all of this fonts all of the fonts again so i'm going to go to file publish to the web and then i'm going to click publish click ok and then i'm going to press command c to copy really quickly before we copy this image over onto our home page i did make an adjustment to the canvas sides to the canvas size can't talk today so just go to file page setup and then change your page setup to be nine by three instead of three by one and then click apply and it will resize all together then click file publish to the web and it's okay if you already publish to the web it will update with the link so then you're going to copy the link and then you're going to click on embed image and then you're going to paste the image here and then when you click down on your dimensions it's going to be really really big so i like to scale down the dimensions to be 300 by 100 and click update and so now you can see this one is a lot better quality than the first one we uploaded because of the canvas being sized as a three by one so click save just to see what this now looks like so now you can see there is this little button here so we're going to click edit and then we're actually going to hyperlink this button to the actual unit 1 module so what you'll do is you'll just click on that image and we want to link it to a module and then we're going to link it to the unit 1 and you can see it kind of like flashed like it was applying the hyperlink and then click save so now you can see whenever i hover over this image it goes from being an arrow to a clickable image so if we go home and we test this from the student view so we go to student view they can click on that unit 1 and it will take them to this first unit one in the modules and as you start adding units it doesn't seem like it makes that big of a difference right now from clicking on the button versus just clicking on modules but as we add units and your page starts getting longer with all of the units you're adding it does help because it takes them right to that module instead of them having to scroll all the way down to find that module all right and the last thing we are going to do in this video is design a course card so a course card is what you see when a student is on the dashboard or even when a teacher is enrolled in a course and it's these little pictures right here that just help grab the viewer's attention instead of just a blank color or a solid color like you see here with my practice course if you do prefer having a solid color you can just simply click on those three dots and you can change the colors here and you can even insert your own custom hex code if you have a certain color code that you like using all right so i am using google drawing to design the canvas course card i will leave a template to this google drawing in the description box below but if you just want to create one from scratch the page dimensions are 7.3 by 4 so if you're going to design yours from scratch you'll need to set your your either powerpoint or google drawing or whatever it is set it up to be those dimensions and then i also included this little square right here just to help me be mindful of the little circle right here that could cover up your canvas course card picture so i'm going to kind of speed this part up because you can be as creative with this or as simple with this as you want and i want to still show you how i would design it if i were using google draw but i also don't want this video to be super long either so here is the sped up version of me designing [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so now we are finished designing and i am going to now delete the square because you don't want to keep that square there whenever you are uploading it because then it'll show up obviously on your course card so just go ahead and delete that square and then you're going to go to file download as a png or a jpeg totally up to you and then let it save to your downloads now you'll want to go inside of your course and along the left hand side you'll want to the left hand side you'll want to click settings and then for your image and then for your image you'll just click choose and then you can upload and then just drag upload or you can just drag and drop and then there it is and you're going to scroll down you'll want to and click the update course click update course details and go back to your dashboard and now your course card has been updated all right one last thing for today's video i want to show you how you can hide some of the links along the left hand side as well as how to add additional links that you may want to add for your students so you'll want to go to settings and then at the top you want to click on navigation all of the links you see right here are the links that are going to be available on the left hand side however if they have an eye with the slash through it meaning it's not visible that means that there may be no content there yet but it is going to show up once you do have content and you publish that content now if there are things on here that you think i'll never have my students access you can drag and drop them and these will be hidden from the students view i loved doing this just to kind of ease up some of the clutter that can occur when you first set up your canvas course so for example people my students didn't need to see the other people in this course files syllabus outcomes collaborations conferences a lot of these were things that my students really didn't need access to they just needed access to the modules their assignments things like that announcements and honestly i simplified mine probably way more than what most people would because truly all my students needed to be able to click on was the modules and the home page and their grades so a lot of this i disabled on my own personal canvas course but it's totally up to you how much you want to take away and how much you want to show when you're finished you'll want to make sure you click save or else it won't update it happened to me before so click save and then if you want to add your own custom link on the left hand side for example maybe you have a grade level website where you house a lot of information or you have a link to your zoom session whatever it may be there there could be multiple reasons why you want to add a link along the navigation just click on apps and then you're going to filter by name and you're going to search for redirect and it's this little blue arrow and it's called the redirect tool so you'll click on that and you'll click add app this is where you'll name it so i'm going to name it fourth grade website you want to show it in the course navigation and show it in the user navigation i just check all of them actually and then you just paste in the website so i'm just going to type in i just typed in website.com because i'm not going to actually add this to this course i'm just giving you an example you would paste the url of the website that you want to paste in then click add app and now you'll need to go back to your navigation and then you have to refresh your page so now you'll see fourth grade website that i just added and you can drag and drop it up to the top and you just repeat this process for any other additional websites you want to add you just go to apps you type in redirect tool again and you install it and you add websites after websites after websites so you just repeat that process so now if we were to look at it with a student view you can now see it simplified some of that clutter along the left hand side which is just going to help your students in the long run so that is it for today's video i did not want this to be a super long video but i did want to show you how you can customize your canvas course like i've said multiple times throughout this video you can be as creative or as basic as you want with canvas and so i hope that you have gained some knowledge from today's video and i look forward to seeing the creations that you all come up with

Channel: Hey, Ashley G!

Views: 221,022

Rating: 4.9393439 out of 5

Keywords: teachertip, educational technology, edtech, teacher, techie, technology, heyashleyg, digital, google, elearning, canvas, canvas course, design canvas, customize canvas

Id: kXx7DHo700I

Length: 37min 8sec (2228 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020