Canvas LMS

Files

A place to save files for each user, group, and course; can be public or private.

Announcements

Allow you to communicate with your students about course activities and post interesting course-related topics.

Assignments

Are any online activity submission that is graded by the instructor, including Quizzes, graded Discussions, and online submissions (i.e. files, images, text, URLs, etc.)

Inbox

Is the messaging tool used instead of email to communicate with a course, a group, an individual student, or a group of students.

Pages

Make it easy to build content inside a course; can be editable by students and teachers

Syllabus

There are three main parts: a calendar and grading scheme for the course situated in the Sidebar on the right side of the page, a list of dated items in the main body of the page that is automatically managed by Canvas, and a RCE at the top of the page that you can edit.

Conferences

Make it easy to create virtual classrooms where students and instructors can interact in real time with audio, video, desktop sharing, and presentation tools.

Modules

Make it possible to organize course content by week, topic, or day; can be set up with pre-requisites or co-requisites that force students to walk through the material in a sequential fashion

Collaborations

Makes it easy for students and instructors to create Google Documents that can be edited by the entire course or any subset of the course roster.

Calendar

Makes it easy for students and instructors to see all of the events and assignments going on across all of their courses

SpeedGrader

Makes it easy to evaluate student work. Instructors can use rubrics for fast assessment and leave text, video, and audio comments for their students.

Course Import/Export Tool

Makes it easy to pull in content from existing Canvas courses and content packages from other LMSs and textbook publishers

Settings

Allow instructors to customize the Course Navigation, add users, import content, and link to external tools

Global Navigation

Always positioned at the left of the page, allows users to quickly navigate to any courses or groups that they are enrolled in. They can also view their grades and calendar from here.

Rubric

An assessment tool for communicating expectations of quality; typically comprised of rows and columns. Rows are used to define the various criteria being used to assess an assignment. Columns are used to define levels of performance for each criterion.

Dashboard

Can be set to card view, list view, or recently activity; the landing page once you have logged into Canvas

Rich Content Editor

Canvas has a simple, yet powerful, word processor that is available anytime for creating new content (assignments, announcement, discussions, blogs etc.) within Canvas

Notification Preferences

Each Canvas user can adjust these in their Profile to fit their individual needs. Some users will want to be notified of course events on a more regular basis than others.

Profile

Each user can modify this in Canvas, including setting their display name, changing the time zone, and uploading a profile picture.

Groups

Gan be created for students or by students to enable efficient collaboration

New Analytics

Help the instructor to see which pages are being viewed most frequently

Outcomes

Instructors can specify learning outcomes for their courses and track how students are doing against those outcomes with Quizzes, Assignments, and graded Discussions.

Course Navigation

Is a series of links on the left side of your screen that help you get to where you want to go within your Canvas Course.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Is at the top of the Main Body of the page and helps you to how to move up and down in the course hierarchy.

Help

Is located at the bottom of the global navigation; where you can ask for support or go to the Canvas Guides

Course Home Page

Is the first page that students see when they click on "Home" in their Course Navigation; can be customized to display a custom Page, the Syllabus page, the Assignment page, or the Modules page.

People

Lists all of the students that are enrolled in a course.

Course Activity Stream

Shows you all of the recent activity from a single course

Global Activity Stream

Shows you all of the recent activity from all of your courses

Quizzes

The assessment tool used in Canvas

Grades

The name for the Canvas gradebook. Students can calculate hypothetical grades on this page. Instructors can quickly edit grades for any course or section.