All posts by Stephanie Olson

I am an Instructional Technology Specialist supporting LHS, CMMS, and MMS. I have a BA in English, MA in English, and a MA in Secondary Education; I taught middle school and high school ELA for 11 years before transitioning to a role in educational technology. I love collaborating and working with teachers on how best to integrate technology into their curriculum to create a dynamic learning experience for students. I also love showcasing how technology can engage students and bridge gaps by making content more accessible for all learners. I am very excited to be a part of such a dynamic team and innovative district.

Canvas New Analytics, Data at Your Fingertips

Canvas New Analytics is available at the course level in Canvas. In order to enable this, you will need to open your course, open settings, and then choose "navigation." From there, you will want to enable New Analytics (remember to SAVE). It can also be accessed from the course home dashboard. New Analytics offers some ...

Canvas Submission Updates: Webcam & Reassign

Two new features have been made available in Canvas that you might have noticed. First is the option to reassign work to your students, the other (which you may not see on your end) is the ability for students to submit using their webcam. Webcam Submissions Students who have been trying to submit images of ...

Canvas + Betterizer = Better Comments Faster

So, first a shout out to Camille Wright, teacher and Skyward guru extraordinaire at Maywood Middle School for sharing this with our team. Betterizer is a Chrome extension that works with Speedgrader in Canvas to help with stored comments. You can easily write five comments of your choice and with a quick click add them ...

Teacher Feature: Zoom Breakouts

Great teaching is happening around our district, whether it is online, hybrid, or in-person. As a TOSA, I have not been able to observe this teaching as often as I have in the past. I might get into a classroom to help solve a tech problem, which I am happy to do, but that often ...

Unsync Canvas Assignments

The syncing dilemma of a new grading period in a yearlong course has now fully impacted all of our secondary teachers (with yearlong courses). As you go to sync the new Trimester or Semester, you are faced with a wall of assignments impeding your selection of current assignments. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, you finally find the ...

Canvas, Power of Pages

Pages are the ability to share content with your class and we use them as web pages of information, class pages of content, and landing pages before we get to the assignment. But Pages are powerful, they can become places for student collaboration with the toggle of a drop-down menu. As you are becoming more ...

Using Flipgrid for Student Help

One of my favorite parts of being a teacher is collaborating with my colleagues. This post idea is brought to you by Ally Johnson and Jamie Street from Issaquah Middle School. When looking for help, you are the first person a student is going to contact for a class related issue. That might come through ...

Canvas New Rich Content Editor

It's a New Year and a New Rich Content Editor (RCE) is making its way to Canvas. Starting January 16, the new RCE will be enforced, so consider making the change now. Here is an introduction of changes you can expect to see. Here is a comparison of the editors in full (left is old, ...

Canvas Help, Check it Out

One of the features of Canvas is the Help icon located on the Global Navigation. It might get overlooked, but here is why you and your students should be using it. Teacher Help The teacher Help offers quick access to the Canvas Guides, which can answer just about any question you may have about Canvas. ...

It’s Hour of Code Week! (Secondary)

Computer Science Education Week is happening now, December 7-13, and schools around the world are in! Hour of Code is one of the many ways to celebrate this introduction to coding. Register your school or class to participate and get on the map. Why Participate? Hour of Code has a mission of broadening the field ...