Focus of the Week: Canvas Assignments

This Friday Five is the second in a series of follow-ups on topics covered and discussed on our Oct 14 Professional Learning Day. This edition's focus is on Assignments in Canvas. 

1. Review of the Basics

Assignments....

• Are flexible and include quizzes, graded discussions, and work that is collected on paper or electronically. 
• When collected in Canvas, can include video, audio, text entries, or Word or Google Docs files.
• Automatically appear on a student's calendar and to-do list when they include a due date.
• Can be added to a Module for easy organization.

2. What are the assigning options for an Assignment in Canvas?

Assignments can be assigned to an individual student(s), an entire section of a course, or to an entire course (all sections).

3. If I want to passback an assignment grade from Canvas to PowerTeacherPro (PTP) but want to give different due dates to different sections of the same course, what do I do?

In this scenario, you will want to Duplicate your assignment and assign each copy to an individual section. This will allow you to pass each assignment back to PTP with unique due dates. Duplicating an assignment is easy. Here are the directions. Once you have enough copies, assign one to each section by selecting just one period from the "Assign to" field as shown below.

4. How do I create reminders for long-term assignment in Canvas?

There are two ways you can do this. You can either create a repeating Event that serves as a reminder or you can "stretch" a single event on the calendar-see below.

5. My students struggle creating their own document to complete an Assignment. Can I provide an individual document to each student directly in Canvas?

Yes, you can do this by creating a Cloud-Based assignment using either Google Docs or Office 365. Here are the directions for Team Google and here are the direcitons for Team Office 365.