September 9, 2025 - New year, New updates

Welcome back! Today's tech tip is less tip and more just a Canvas update. I promise to be more exciting after next week's testing day. 😄

Canvas:

• Two new integrations are available to everyone this year: Canva and WeVIdeo. Basically this means you can assign projects to your students that they would complete with those platforms, right in Canvas. Training opportunities to come!

• It's not you, it's Speedgrader. Many of you may have noticed that when you try to switch between sections in a course in Speedgrader, it instead goes from showing you one section to showing you multiple. The Canvas discussion boards are flooded with complaints about this. And Canvas says they're working on "a fix". Unfortunately, that means that for now we have to deal with some extra clicks. Here is what's happening:

  • When you go to Speedgrader from the gradebook view, it will take on the same filters. So, if you're only looking at your 2nd block, only your second block will initially show in Speedgrader. If you're looking at all of your sections, they will all show. Etc.

  • Once you're in Speedgrader and go to where you'd normally switch sections, imagine there is an invisible set of checkboxes. When you click on a different section, instead of switching to it like it always has, it now activates/deactivates it.

    • Which wouldn't be so bad if you could activate and deactive sections all at once. When you click on a new section, it adds it and closes that dropdown. You then have to open it again to deactivate the original section to just get the new section you want to view.

  • Yes, IT IS VERY ANNOYING. 🤪

  • You can see which sections you are viewing in that dropdown because those that are activated are bolded while those that aren't active are not bolded.

  • If you deactivate all sections, it defaults back to viewing all sections.

  • I promise to keep you posted on any changes to this.

• In good news, they did add more functionality to accommodations and modifications, including the much desired ability to add extra time to a quiz while the student is taking it. Here is a doc for you with instructions for setting accommodations permanently for a student, how to add time to an attempt in progress, and how to let a student close an attempt and pick it back up in the same spot later on.

• As we start a new year, you may get requests from parents for a pairing code in Canvas. Instructions to generate one are here. 

And in case you missed it in the body of the email, here is the link to my survey I'd really appreciate you all filling out. I'd love to dive into more hands on tech training for you and more integrations with your students this year. Thank you in advance!