Paragraphs are defined in HTML with a tag. Place the at the beginning of your paragraph text, and make sure that at the end of the paragraph you close the tag . It is important to remember that line breaks in the HTML editor will not render as line breaks on the Canvas page. The line will extend to the edge of the screen (or element) and the lines will adjust to accommodate the screen size. If I manually put line breaks in specific places, as such:
4 Canvas Features that will Leave You Charmed
In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, we’re highlighting four of our lucky Canvas features. These four features will leave you wanting to do an Irish jig. So grab your favorite beverage and join us on a journey through Canvas’ most charming features.
New Quizzes
The New Quiz feature in Canvas is (sham)rockin’! When starting out with New Quizzes, you may find it beneficial to check out our New Quiz Readiness Checklist . This is a great resource to get you started.
Now, more on why New Quizzes are the bomb.com:
- More Question Types : The question-type options give teachers the opportunity to reach multiple levels of understanding within one quiz. Categorization, matching, hot spot, and ordering are a few of our favorite question types. Giving students the ability to show their knowledge in a variety of ways provides a clearer view of student understanding.
- Enhanced Security : New Quizzes provide better security measures to prevent your students from cheating. Being able to randomize question order, add time limits, and lock down your students’ browser helps to ensure that their work…is actually THEIR work.
- Better Accessibility : One of our favorite things about New Quizzes is that they are more accessible to all learners. Alternative text for images and the ability to use screen readers make New Quizzes easier to navigate with assistive technologies.
- Improved Feedback : New Quizzes offer teachers more ways to provide improved feedback . In New Quizzes, teachers can provide detailed feedback to students, including specific feedback for correct and incorrect answers and general feedback for the entire quiz.
You may have heard that Instructure was choosing to do away with Classic Quizzes altogether. While this was the plan, we heard educators’ concerns loud and clear and removed the deadline to switch to New Quizzes. Our goal is to facilitate a seamless transition to New Quizzes when customers are ready.
To learn more about Best Practices for Formative and Summative Assessments in Canvas, check out this blog post written by KC Testerman ( @KCTesterman ) and Payton Halinger ( @Payton-Halinger ).
PRO TIP:
Do you have all of your quizzes already built in Classic Quizzes? No worries! We have you covered. Check out this relatively easy process for converting Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes . We also created a New Quizzes Hub to further help you in your transition.
Mastery Paths
Mastery Paths allow teachers to customize/personalize the student learning experience based on student performance or choice.
Every teacher would like to give all of their students just-in-time feedback and guided assistance, but many just do not have the time. Mastery Paths allow teachers to predetermine which resources and assessments to give students based on their skill level, which ensures that each student will have their needs met immediately.
The following learning experience will lead you to personalized learning gold at the end of the Mastery Paths rainbow. It unpacks use cases, how to get started, steps to building Mastery Paths, considerations for Mastery Paths, and best practices for implementing Mastery Paths.
We’ve created this fun Genial.ly for you to interact with to learn more about Mastery Paths! Click the image below to begin. Every slide is interactive so be sure to click on either the + or the icons.
PRO TIP:
Always, always test the Mastery Paths in Student View before delivering live to students. For other considerations in building and implementing Mastery Paths, check out those slides in the above presentation.
Immersive Reader
This feature is a hidden gem, a game changer that will open up a treasure trove of access and readability, and comprehension for teachers and students. The Microsoft Immersive Reader can be used on any page or assignment, and the course syllabus.
To access, choose any content page or assignment and then click Immersive Reader (upper right-hand side). Currently, Discussions and Quizzes do not have this capability.
Click the audio button at the bottom and the Reader will begin reading the content. If a learner doesn’t like the default voice settings, they can click the voice settings to change the speed and the voice.
Here is a wealth of other features that will boost reading comprehension:
- Increase font size and line spacing.
- Change the theme color of the page.
- Click on individual words to hear the word sound and see a pictorial representation of the word.
- Turn on syllables.
- Show the parts of speech with specific colors and label each word based on its part of speech.
- Change the line focus to a single line, double line, or paragraph.
Watch this video demonstrating each feature (this video has no sound).
Important Note: In order to use this feature, it must be turned on at the Account and Course levels. System Admins may choose to turn the tool on for the entire Canvas instance or leave it as an opt-in feature for Teachers. In this case, Teachers will then need to turn it on at the course level by going to Settings > Feature Options > Microsoft Immersive Reader.
PRO TIP:
If a learner’s native language is not English, encourage him or her to translate the text. Check out how to do this in your Canvas course.
View Page History
The final feature that makes us head-‘clover’-heels in love with Canvas is the ability to view the page history.
Review Changes : Viewing the page history gives you the ability to review changes. If you want to see what changes have been made to a particular page over time, viewing the page history can be helpful. You can see who made changes to the page, what they changed, and when they made the changes.
Collaboration : If multiple people are working on a page, viewing the page history can help everyone to keep track of who has made changes and when the changes were made. This can help to avoid conflict when making changes to the same page.
Restoring Previous Versions : If you accidentally deleted or make significant changes to a page and you want to revert to a page version, viewing the page history can help identify the version you want to restore. You can then restore that version of the page and make the necessary edits.
Overall, using the view page history feature in Canvas can help you better understand changes made to a page over time and help you resolve any issues that may arise.
Final Thoughts
These features are Leprechaun-approved and packed with charm. Which ones are your favorites? Which ones leave you charmed? Do you have others you could share? In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, we want to leave you with this Irish limerick.
A Canvas course with engagement galore.
features to explore.
New Quizzes for assessment.
Immersive Reader, what a great present.
Page History to review and more.
Designing content, a creative art,
Each element plays its part.
Learning made fun with features second to none,
Canvas, the perfect place to start!
We’d love to hear about your favorite features in Canvas! Let us know why in the comments below!
Please comment below. We’d love to hear from you!
Our Instructional Design team offers templates, consultation, badging services, course evaluations, workshops, and more. If you would like to learn more about our services, please contact your CSM or @rosina_marie , Manager, Learning Services, via [email protected]
Labels
- Instructional Design Services
Expanding the Canvas for Art Class
As the director of education and research in learning for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, Anne Kraybill gets to appreciate seminal works of American art every day. She’s determined to make sure that more students around the country—regardless of location or economic status—have the same opportunity.
“Museums have usually been seen as a peripheral experience to traditional K–12 classrooms,” says Kraybill. “But with online learning, we have a big opportunity now to shape what courses there are, who is teaching them, and what materials students have access to. We have to step it up.”
Working with EDC’s EdTech Leaders Online (ETLO) team, Kraybill and Crystal Bridges have developed high-quality, immersive online courses to extend the museum’s resources to students across Arkansas and the rest of the country. The partnership is both improving arts education in the state and reshaping the traditional relationship between schools and art museums.
At the center of this collaboration are two for-credit online art courses that are currently delivered by Virtual Arkansas, the state’s virtual school, which reaches tens of thousands of students in close to 200 districts. The courses draw heavily on the Crystal Bridges collections to engage students in what it means to make, understand, and discuss works of art:
- In Art Appreciation and American Identity, students consider how the identity of the United States is represented in the art during different periods in history. As a final project, students curate a virtual exhibit using some of Crystal Bridges’ most famous pieces.
- In Art + Process: Creating a Body of Work, students meet contemporary artists and explore the importance of artistic process. They create their own works of art and share them using an online portfolio tool developed by EDC.
“They are making a difference for teachers who want to bring art into their classrooms,” says Kirsten Peterson, director of ETLO. “In the end, the best online learning still comes down to a teacher connecting with students around a piece of content.”
Easy HTML in Canvas for beginners
HTML is HyperText Markup Language, and is the foundation of all web pages. It helps our computers interpret what is on a webpage: images, tables, paragraphs, headings, etc. When we create content in Canvas using the Rich Content Editor (RCE), then Canvas converts our content into code (HTML). When students access our pages and assignments on their computers – specifically their web browsers – convert that HTML code into the images, text, and other elements that we can created.
Have you ever been working on a document or Canvas page and you click a button and all of a sudden everything has shifted and you can’t figure out why that table looks weird and why in the world is everything broken all of a sudden? These episodes of frustration can often be obviated by knowing basic HTML.
![photo-1482062364825-616fd23b8fc1[1].jpg](/images/124/learning-the-art-BAF254.jpg)
10 essential HTML tags to get started
HTML elements start with tags. Most elements have an opening tag, information, and a closing tag. The tags are those things found within angled brackets, such as:
, ,
, ,
There are more than one hundred different tags, but today we will discuss 10 tags to get you started creating your own content.
Heading tags allow you to create titles and subtitles on your Canvas pages. By default, the title of the page/assignment/announcement/etc. will be your heading 1, or . Your main heading will be . You can nest headings as well, so could be your main sections and could be your subsections. In
Paragraphs are defined in HTML with a
tag. Place the
at the beginning of your paragraph text, and make sure that at the end of the paragraph you close the tag
. It is important to remember that line breaks in the HTML editor will not render as line breaks on the Canvas page. The line will extend to the edge of the screen (or element) and the lines will adjust to accommodate the screen size. If I manually put line breaks in specific places, as such:
Portland intelligentsia activated charcoal
sustainable typewriter humblebrag sriracha leggings snackwave.
Art party freegan ramps next level twee succulents glossier polaroid
single-origin coffee green juice. Gentrify celiac skateboard listicle
butcher locavore. Etsy kickstarter post-ironic,
yuccie thundercats banjo blog deep.
…then the browser will simply render it thus:
Portland intelligentsia activated charcoal sustainable typewriter humblebrag sriracha leggings snackwave. Art party freegan ramps next level twee succulents glossier polaroid single-origin coffee green juice. Gentrify celiac skateboard listicle butcher locavore. Etsy kickstarter post-ironic, yuccie thundercats banjo blog deep.
If you do want to insert a line break in your paragraph, then you can do that using the
tag. Unlike the and
tags, the line break tag doesn’t need a closing tag. There doesn’t exist: . The
tag allows me to break up my paragraph, so:
Portland intelligentsia activated charcoal sustainable typewriter humblebrag sriracha leggings snackwave.
Art party freegan ramps next level twee succulents glossier polaroid single-origin coffee green juice.
Gentrify celiac skateboard listicle butcher locavore. Etsy kickstarter post-ironic, yuccie thundercats banjo blog deep.
Portland intelligentsia activated charcoal sustainable typewriter humblebrag sriracha leggings snackwave.
Art party freegan ramps next level twee succulents glossier polaroid single-origin coffee green juice.
Gentrify celiac skateboard listicle butcher locavore. Etsy kickstarter post-ironic, yuccie thundercats banjo blog deep.
It is all still one paragraph of text, but I can force some of the sentences onto new lines.
Another great tag is the , which allows us to place images from the internet onto the Canvas page. If you want to upload an image from your computer, then you can do that in the RCE, but if you’d like to put a picture from the internet then you can pull that in with HTML. Here is an example of what that code would look like:
The src=”https://www.howtocanvas.com/create-amazing-pages-in-canvas/URL” is referring to the website where the image is located. src mean source, so the tag is essentially telling the browser “I want to put an image here” and the src= is saying “this is the image I want to put there”. You can also define a specific width for the image (either using HTML or CSS, but we’ll discuss the former here). If the image is small then you might not want to make it larger because it will distort it and the image will be blurry. But sometimes images are quite large, so you’ll want to specify a smaller size. A picture with a width of 1,100 pixels will be quite large, so perhaps you just want it 300 pixels wide. In this case, you can define that in the line of HTML code:
width=”300px” src=”{SRC}”>
An anchor tag allows you to hyperlink text or images on your Canvas page. You’ll want to define precisely what should be hyperlinked, and when the student clicks on the hyperlink where should they go. You specify the destination by writing in the tag: href=”URL”. Suppose I wanted to hyperlinked the words “sustainable typewriter” in my paragraph example above, and I want to take the student to my YouTube channel. I would code that as such:
I included the code: target=”_blank” because this will open the link in a new tab instead of navigating away from the Canvas page. I think it’s a good practice to open content in new tabs so that students stay in the Canvas course.
and
If you want to bold or italicize your text, then you can do that with the and tags, respectively. In previous years we would use and , and those still work, but with more people using web-assistive devices such as screen readers, the use of the and tags help us put emphasis on key words or phrases. Using the paragraph example above, I will add a little emphasis:
Portland intelligentsia activated charcoal sustainable typewriter humblebrag sriracha leggings snackwave. Art party freegan ramps next level twee succulents glossier polaroid single-origin coffee green juice. Gentrify celiac skateboard listicle butcher locavore. Etsy kickstarter post-ironic, yuccie thundercats banjo blog deep.
This paragraph would render on my Canvas page as such:
Portland intelligentsia activated charcoal sustainable typewriter humblebrag sriracha leggings snackwave. Art party freegan ramps next level twee succulents glossier polaroid single-origin coffee green juice. Gentrify celiac skateboard listicle butcher locavore. Etsy kickstarter post-ironic, yuccie thundercats banjo blog deep.
Horizontal rules are useful elements in order to create lines to separate content on the Canvas page. A simple
will create a single pixel line that will span the width of the page. It is possible to stylize your
using CSS in order to make it more fancy or interesting. For more information, refer to the HowToCanvas video:
