First Things First
Getting the most from Canvas and your peer community is critical to your success. Here are two things you should do right now to help put you on the path to success:
Review Your Canvas Settings and Profile
The discussion forums in Canvas are much more fun when we can put a face to a name (seeing your friendly face along with your post really helps to build community!). Please take a minute to update your Canvas profile information to include a picture or avatar of yourself. To learn more, please read the Canvas Guide, What are Profile and User Settings?
Set Your Canvas Notifications
Canvas offers users the unique ability to customize how and when you (or your students) would like to receive notifications from the course. Users (both students and teachers) can tailor their notification preferences so that feedback on assignments, grades, and other communication activities within the Canvas course are pushed out to their email or phone. This includes the option of having announcements sent directly to your email or texts, which we strongly suggest.
I/we will officially begin each week with an announcement, and will occasionally use announcements during a module to remind you of important due dates, events, or supplemental resources. (Announcements are a really important tool that allows the instructor to deliver timely communication to the students in the course by pushing information out to them.)
A few important details about announcements:
- The announcements that come to you in email do not have videos and images that may be in the Canvas version of the announcement.
- If you need to check a video or an older announcement, all course announcements are archived and can be accessed via the "Announcements" link in the course navigation menu.
- (Instructors, add this bullet if your course will use this setting.) When you log-into our course, the most recent announcements will be listed at the top of our course homepage.
Additional Resources
One of the most amazing things about Canvas is their rich resource of guides. Because many of us are new to Canvas, we've assembled a few guides here to help you learn more about notifications and announcements. Throughout the course, we'll provide you with links to guides you might find help. Look for the symbol for links to textual online guides. For those that prefer to watch or listed to instructions about using Canvas, we'll also include a video guide wherever possible.
Please read through both tabbed pages before selecting "Next."