Email Blasts with Infinite Campus

It is always a pain to try to keep up communication to parents when you have so many different circumstances for each of your students.  Thankfully, Infinite Campus has a ton of tools to make this easier!

Using Infinite Campus to Get Out the Word

Infinite Campus has a built in Messenger tool that allows teachers to send messages to their students and their guardians.  The messages will be delivered to the Message Center in the student or parent/guardian portal along with the option to send to their school or personal email. The following types of messages can be sent with the Messenger tool: Class Message, Missing Assignment Messenger, Grades Messenger.

Another option would be use Infinite Campus to get a mailing list for your whole class!

In Infinite Campus, select the desired class in Roster or Gradebook. Then, scroll down to "Custom Reports"

And then select "Canvas Student Roster"

You will then be taken to a screen that looks like this:

This allows you to create mailing lists in gmail that can be super useful if you don't like the messaging tools built into Infinite Campus. Classroom newsletters, reminders about upcoming events and a host of other uses make this system a true time saver.

Submitted by John Wilkinson, Science Teacher at Brookfield Central High School

Canvas Keeps Getting Better and Better!

In this day and age, technology is constantly changing and, most of the time, the changes are for the better.

Over the summer, Instructure updated some tools in the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS).  Here are a few highlights:

• Teacher App for iOS and Android devices: This app replaces the SpeedGrader app with a few improvements to make grading submissions easier.  Teachers can use this app to communicate with their students....sending messages, posting announcements and participating in online discussions.  Another helpful feature of the updated app is being able to update basic course content such as due dates, publish/unpublish and adjust other settings and options.

• Duplicate Assignments or Pages: "Duplicate" is now an option on the Settings menu (gear icon) for an assignment or page.  Great time saver if you want to create something with similar settings or format.

• DocViewer:  When students submit a MS Office file or a pdf, you can use the updated DocViewer to provide feedback by adding a comment and annotating the submission.

• BluePrint Courses: A course setting that designates a "master course" that can be copied.  When updates are made to the "master course," the copied courses will automatically receive the updates.

This summer, I had the opportunity to present at InstructureCon with Megan Fisher.  We really enjoyed sharing our experiences with Canvas and learning a ton from other Canvas presenters and users.  There were so many sessions to choose from so I am looking forward to watching the presentations that I was not able to attend. Check out all of the session recordings: InstructureCon2017

If you are new to Canvas or would like more information, contact your Teaching and Learning Specialist/Coach and check out Elmbrook's Canvas Support Site.