Episode 14: It’s Time to Up Your LMS Game
You’ve used Google Classroom (because what teacher hasn’t?), and while it works, you’d like to move on to something that can do a little bit more. Maybe you want to administer a test with a lockdown browser, or you’re looking for a way to quickly and easily group students for online discussion board activities.
A little context. We were not early adopters to the LMS life. We were not excitedly posting our lesson plans on our school website in the mid-2000s as many of our more tech-forward colleagues were. We were not part of the first wave of educators to embrace Google Classroom (although we could have potentially saved a whole forest full of trees). But . . . When, in early August 2020 it looked like our district was going to require all teachers to use Canvas LMS, we dove in headfirst. Who were we? Certainly not people our previous selves would recognize. Whether we were motivated by a desire to make-this-whole-distance-learning-thing work for our students (probably) or we recognized the limitations of Google Classroom (possibly–we did, after all, survive spring 2020), we decided we were going to embrace Canvas LMS and figure out how to make it work for us and for our students.
We started school in mid-August. By late August we were really liking Canvas, by late September we knew we’d never go back to Google Classroom. By October, we were trying to convince our colleagues to ditch GC and embrace the Canvas LMS life.
Now we want to share all the reasons you, too, should be embracing Canvas. Before you start thinking, “But my school doesn’t use Canvas LMS.” They don’t have to. (They should be, but that’s another episode.) Canvas is free for teachers. Okay, first objection addressed.
Press play. Let’s get started.
Making Your Canvas LMS Student-Friendly
We firmly believe that part of making any LMS successful is setting it up in a way that feels intuitive and helpful to students. Canvas LMS does a lot of this work for us, but there are two things you can do: first, make an easy-to-navigate home page; second, embrace the weekly agenda. Check out these short YouTube videos to learn more.