School Communication and Engagement through Schoolwide Canvas Course "Hubs"

Hi. I'm Melody Lam. I am, with Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools. We are in Charlotte, North Carolina. And today, I'm gonna be talking to you about school communication and engagement through wide canvas course hubs, which is very wordy. So, we're just gonna talk about how to basically make campus course house for your school or even your district, in terms of, like, you know, engaging with, like, students, and, faculty and possibly other, members of your district.

So, let's get started. So just kind of if I show a hands, I'm very curious is. Raise your hand if you're a k twelve. You're out of k twelve district. And raise your hand if you're at higher ed.

Okay. So, if is sort of, like, I kinda made it four k twelve, but there are some stuff here that, like, you can generalize it to higher ed. So, hopefully, you're gonna get something everybody in here is gonna get something out of it. So, just a little bit about me. I am from Houston, Texas.

I to Charlotte in two thousand and seventeen. I taught computer science for six years. I taught AP computer science a. I taught principals I was one of the first teachers to teach it at my school. And then I switched over to technology facilitations, the tech coaching.

And then now I'm at the district level. I am the learning. Well, actually technically speaking, I just got promoted. So I'm at the program manager, for IT strategies at Charlotte Meckenvers Schools, I am the sole canvas admin for a humongous district, and you'll find out how many students and staff we have. So, and it's kind of a little bit of certifications.

I am an instructor advocate, so I basically like canvas. I like promoting canvas. I like promoting match to connect, those kind of products. So if you see me around, I have the yellow lanyard. And then, I'm also a certified educational technology leader as well.

I just got that certification this year with Kosin. So if you guys know who Kosin are, they're kind of like big in the ed tech leadership space. My email's up there. And then I also have a GitHub that has a lot of like code samples. I'm very well versed in the Canvas API.

I'll kind of like discuss it sort of a little bit, but, if you are interested in, kind of like what I have available on there. I have some really cool like kind of snippets, code snippets that you can freely use. I use Canvas API, the Python library from the University of Central Florida, and one of the kind of the reasons why I have the job that I have. So, so I like to, you know, give them a shout out because they do it for free. It's open source, and it is amazing.

So that being said, I used to be a school teacher as you can see, so I like to do objectives. So the objectives of this session are to know what a Canvas hub is. How does that look like for students and staff? Use cases. So how do we, you know, we can talk about a Canvas hub forever, but how do you use it in, you know, practice? And then how do you promote it? Right? So one of the things you wanna do is you wanna say, Hey, like, you know, mister so and so and missus so and so, you know, we wanna I wanna make this canvas hub for communication. Let's talk about it.

Right? So kinda like tips and tricks for that. So, oh, this isn't working. So we're gonna skip that. So, what is a Canvas hub? What is this what is this concept of a Canvas hub? So you think of Canvas as a learning management system. Right? You're like, okay, I'm gonna put in my curriculum.

I'm deploy to my students, my students are gonna interact with the content, and they do assignments, do quizzes, blah, blah, blah, blah, they get great, and then they, you know, either get promoted or get retained or whatnot. But Canvas can also be a great tool. We can leverage the things that students are doing every day or staff are doing every day into ways of making your schools more efficient in operating. So we're talking about how can we make our, school admins lives easier, but also, talk about how can we enhance accessibility and also have our students in gauge with your school. Right? So one of the biggest things you've probably seen is like the social emotional learning and the, you know, hey, they're they're coming back from being remote and not interacting with, you know, the community and feeling disconnected.

So what we trying to do with these Canvas hubs is bring back our students and our staff into the school community. So so what is it? How does it look like? It's a one stop shop for any school or outside of classroom material. So some examples that we I I think I can think of, clubs, school level information, like, you know, hey, we, you know, chess club is meeting after school today. Or athletics. Like, we use our Canvas hubs to say, Hey, the field is too wet.

We're not gonna have soccer practice. Go home. Or even grade level information. So, one of the biggest things that I liked, and I'll talk about it is, that our seniors, at the high school level or even, you know, your eighth graders or even your fifth graders who are graduating from school level to another school level, you can use that to promote and push out grade level specific information. Ideally, everybody in the particular group that you're targeting, whether the school level, or maybe even club level, athletic level, etcetera, is enrolled in the hub so that they have access to all the material that that is in the hub, including announcements, having to turn in something like, a certificate or, you know, an assignment, you know, anything like that.

They need to be enrolled in the hub. And then it also contains information that you may not really necessarily wanna to school website with. Right? So your school website is your public facing website where, parents and and students to get to know, like, hey, we have an open house. We have, literacy night. We have a you know, a a play going on.

But, you know, like, you don't necessarily maybe at your school, you have like a hundred clubs. You don't necessarily wanna have a hundred clubs cluttering in the website and and kind of, you know, having your webmaster, be overwhelmed with, like, updating So you wanna put it into the Canvas hub because Canvas is a collaborative area. Right? So you can have, many people be, contributors or teachers in the in hub, and they can update the hub, make announcements and so on and so forth. So again, not use Canvas to engage with our students and staff outside of the classroom? They're using Canvas every day. Right? It's on they it opens up.

They log into it. They they get their school information, etcetera, etcetera. So in terms of, like, school engagement, at least what I've seen from being at the high school and this can apply to any level. Before what what we did with, like, in the school level was, you know, we posted things on the wall. We made school announcements.

When you post things on the wall, kids don't really look at it. Or if they get posted in the bathroom, it usually gets stolen or something like that. Right? We do announcements over to intercom, you know, like, I used to teach in Texas, so we used to do the play and then we had to do the Texas pledge. And by the time you do the Texas pledge, they have lost interest. And now they're like, I do not wanna keep standing.

I do not want to listen to the announcements, or if you had like, really rowdy class, maybe at the the beginning of the year, they couldn't hear the announcements. Or I had a classroom once where some one had disconnected the speaker in my room. And so we didn't get the announcements. So, you know, that that's also a problem. Right? When the the students aren't getting those announcements, they're not finding out about things that are really important.

Like, hey, you know, seniors, about to have the SAT, you know, or or, hey, we need, you know, hey, ninth graders. Make sure that you are, you know, turning in blah, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes you do emails. Like, like, our principal used to email me and say, Hey, we're about to have a fire drill. Half at a time, I didn't look at my email after, like, seven o'clock.

Right? So or the teacher is emailing the student and saying, hey, like, you know, we're gonna have a fire drill, and the student doesn't have their email open at all. They're playing video games. There's no more time. And then the other thing that I see with students too is the FOMO effect. Right? So the fear missing out, I didn't know that was happening, man.

I would have been like there, you know, things like that. So with canvas, you can fix a lot of these things. Right? We've great, with some attention, some building, some legwork. So I'm not gonna tell you that imagine this Canvas hub is gonna pop up out of the ground, and it's gonna be ready for you day one. There's a little bit of work.

So, with Canvas, you could do global or do targeted announcements. So the reason why we don't I we don't use, global announcements, even with subaccount structures, like we do in Charlotte Conberg is because when you have a global announcement, it basically covers the top portion of the page. And if it's a relatively long announcement, it can push everything down. The other thing too is that oftentimes you wanna have a targeted announcement. So you only want seniors to know about prom.

You don't want the freshman to know about prom. Because they don't they're they're not gonna care about prom. Right? You know, seniors are not gonna care about, hey, we have the state mandate testing day for ACT. They're not gonna care about that. They don't wanna see that, or to get confused because some of our students don't know what grade level they're in.

So you don't wanna confuse them. Right? So that's why we why we use these hubs. Notifications of new announcements, notification system is really great. It sends emails them. If they have the app, it sends an app, notification.

If their parents observing them, they're getting a notification as well. So the parent can go, hey, Johnny, you got, You gotta wake up early for testing. You gotta, like, have a great night's sleep. You gotta, you know, make sure you have just two sharpened pencils or whatever. Bring your chromebook, things like that.

And then also, like, we do make our students, like, turn in things, at a school level, turn in some stuff, and we'll talk about that. As we, I'll I'll show you a demo how that's gonna look like, but, you know, you can have assignments to turn in things digitally. That's great because one, as we all know, probably in here with canvas, you have the speed grader so you can look at it. And then two, you have the message students who. And then, you know, you can say, you didn't turn this in, and we need to do to turn it in now.

So, well, and we'll talk about strategies for that as well. And then also the other thing with Canvas too is a one stop shop. Right? So it's truly a single place for handbooks and forms. Right? You have a school handbook. You have a school student handbook that says, Hey, you are to be here at this time.

You're not to have door dash delivery you lunch. You are to wear khakis with a blue polo because that's our colors. And, you know, when kids go, oh, I didn't know that. You can go, hey, what it was in the canvas? Or the kid says, I don't know about the fees that we have for the school year. You could say, hey, it's in canvas.

Right? And they know where to go because that's where they are getting everything else from their teachers and, you know, their classes. So we talk about school engagement with students and we think about students, but we also need to think about our staff, right? Cause their staff are all, you know, they're lifelong learners. And some of our staff, especially if they're entering in the middle of the year, which all of you guys have probably experienced in the past few years that, you know, you have that comes into the middle of the year, they are brand new to your school and your culture, and they don't know they don't have any idea where to start. So we build staff hub courses to help out with that because what we do is we just, you know, whoever is in charge of that account, which, when I was at my high school as me, I would in it was part of their onboarding. I would add them to the Canvas course and say, Hey, this is where we are doing, this is where your handbook is, this is where your blah blah blah blah blah is, you know, if you just put it all in that canvas course, So when you talk about school engagement, oftentimes, at least before we had the hubs, it was always those emails in the inbox.

Your principal sent you an email saying, were about to have a fire drill, and then you didn't see it. And then now, oh my god, I've lost like twenty minutes of my instructional time because there's a fire drill. You had before school, after school staff meetings, or, as I like to sometimes call them meetings for the sake of meeting. You also had the word-of-mouth with your peers. So if you I have to stand outside my door, and sometimes my peers would ask me what is going on because I was the person who read the email that the principal sent.

Sometimes, sometimes it was like, I don't know what's going on. And then you're going down the hall and no one in the hall knows what's going on. Right? So then you have issues of like, well, I didn't know this was happening. But why didn't you read the email? No. I didn't read the email blah blah blah blah blah.

And then there's there's that confusion across your staff with, like, you know, someone knows about something, or maybe someone thought of that they knew about something, and then now there's rumors and and, confusion amongst your staff. Paper printouts. Yeah. We we still did paper. We had printers in our room.

We would print out, you know, our certificates, and we would slide them in under the principal's door, or put them in an inbox or something like that. And then also again, the I didn't know that was happening. I didn't know that there was this play that one of my students was is going to be in. I didn't know that we are going to the state championship for football. So now with canvas, you can, again, same thing.

You can kind of see between the two that's very similar. Right? So it's not it's not just it's not canvas isn't just for, you know, students and engaging with students. It's also engaging with staff members and adults. So with Canvas announcements, you make an announcement, and you say, Hey, you know, here's what's going on for the week. There you go.

You could also have recordings of a meeting. So if you've actually met to do something like talk about school safety, you can have that recording of the meeting available for anybody who can come because they had to go pick up their kid or they were sick or whatnot. So you can have that accountability of everybody knows what's going on. Right? And then again, staff members still have to turn in assignments. There are certain times where, like, we we have to turn in some stuff, especially during COVID, have to turn in our all over PD like certificates.

And so we use Canvas to kinda leverage that instead of having to print it out and then drive to school and and turn it in or email it, and then god forbid it gets lost in the principal's email. We made Canvas like the hub for those assignments. So you had it one place, you had accountability, you had it all baked in with the power of canvas. So none of this is is really anything extra get on top of what you're already doing with Canvas, with your students, and or your schools, or your staff members. So, okay, now I go with the this is the y, and now we wanna go with what does it look like? Cause that's that's what you really are here for.

How do how do we do it at our district? So just a little bit of background. Remember, when I said I'm the sole Canvas admin for my district, I'm the sole Canvas admin one hundred and forty one thousand students and twenty thousand employees. So we are the second largest district in North Carolina, Wake County, Raleigh in the research triangle is the largest district, by just over, like, twenty thousand students. We have a hundred and eighty schools. I think right now, it's a hundred and eighty three.

And we keep opening new schools because we are just, like, growing as a metro area. By the way, Charlotte Meckenberg Schools does just it doesn't just cover Charlotte. It covers the whole Cenberg County, which also includes huntersville, Cornelius Davidson, Matthews, and it's really wide. It's like, it's big. So you're that's why we have that many students.

The other thing I I wanna point out to is we are a one on one system with Chromebooks and grades three to twelve, which is is also, the reason why I mentioned that is is, one of the reasons why we didn't do global announcements because Chromebooks have a really limited space. And so when it's and can't access the courses, they immediately disengage with the content that the teacher is teaching. So we kind of wanted to avoid trying doing large global announcements at schools. So, just a little bit quick on a Canvas instance. So if you really wanna know this is kind of like nerdy stuff.

Each school has a subaccount, and that's where the hubs live. So the hubs that are some of our schools eight live in the subaccount so that the subaccount admins, which are usually our leadership at the schools, and our technology contacts, and our leaders, have access to the hub and have control over it, especially when there's turnover. Because when you have turnover, and you can't find the Canvas course. You have to ask your Canvas admin and, you know, Canvas admin is just me. So, and then the roles at the root level, we actually we have our regular roles, but we actually have a special role that's kind of like a TA role.

It's called non edit teacher, and this is kind of really cool because it gives, it gives the, user read only access to the course as a teacher. So they see everything that's published and unpublished ish. But they can make announcements. So that's really helpful when you have, when you want to have some kind of, like, moderate control over the content of the hub, but you still want teachers to make announcements when they need to for their clubs or or teams order, special events. So, that's a special role.

And, I can't really pull up Canvas right now. To kinda show you, but I can always, if you contact me, I can always send you what that role looks like, in terms of permissions. So I'm gonna show you some example hubs. I'm actually gonna just show you my old school's hubs. These were actually created, before I became a technology facilitator.

So we've been using it even before COVID. But when COVID hit, it was really paramount that we, like, utilize the hubs to the full potential. And so one of the things that I, trained our, teachers was to how to make announcements. I mean, a lot of our teachers knew how to make announcements, but they didn't know how to make an announcement. Like, in terms of, like, details and things like that.

So this is kind of like our our student home. And really what it is is just the announcements at the top and then of important links at the bottom, and it's kind of like no frills. We didn't really wanna, I didn't really wanna make it kind of like really flashy. I'm very more functional, rather than form. I think I might be able to I I don't know if I can.

Let's see how much time I have, like, five thirty five. Okay. So let me see if I can pull up providences because, like, we have this amazing course. And I'm wondering if it's, like, down here. I don't it.

Dang it. I probably should have done it. Oops. I messed up. Okay.

Let me go back. Okay. So basically, what we do here is, we we have various people make announcements. So these are not just, our leaders but our our our teachers are making announcements as well. As you may know, there's always the the little clause in the in your contract that says other duties as assigned.

We have a bunch of teachers who, volunteer or they they love doing it. We are we have had I don't remember how long she's been doing it. We've had the same person do yearbook and prom, and she does their amazing job. So I wish I could and why is it not loading? Okay. I wanna yeah.

The internet in here is is not very great. So it kinda let me see if I can let me see if I can just go to assignments first, and then that shouldn't take too long to load, hopefully. Okay. I got lucky, I guess. Let me just show you the staff drive while the assignments are loading on the on the on the student's side so I can show you.

So this is a staff version. And so the staff version, our our culture is all about communication, and so basically our principle, puts out a weekly update every Sunday, and they use and and and it's it's they got there. It was very slow, but they got there. They use the schedule announcements to schedule the announcement to come out at a certain time, so they don't have to worry it. So they craft the announcement.

Our our new principal changed over to Fridays, at my old school. But our principal crafty announcement on Friday and then set it for Sunday morning at eight o'clock. And, at first, when I first started in Charlotte Meckenberg, Canvas was not my first LMS. My first LMS was actually this product called its learning. You may have heard it.

You may have not. They pulled out of the North American market. Recently. But, it was terrible. But anyway, we got we get to Canvas, and I'm like, how is my principal? Sending those like, weekly updates out consistently at eight AM.

I was really confused because this is my first time using Canvas. And then I figured out that she was actually using the schedule schedule the announcement send function. I was like, that's really cool. Because it's awesome because in the it's always consistent. You know when it's gonna come out.

You can read it while you're having your coffee or ignore it or whatever. But this is our staff home base, and our staff home base is, basically, the the staff hub for my old school, which is Hub High School. And what you'll notice is that we have our, staff dashboard staff drive. We have all of these, like, important links here. So anything that a teacher needed to access, we put it over here them to to see and have.

And then the other thing you may have noticed on the side over here is that we use Canvas as a way to upload grade verification from our SIS system. So one of the things that teachers have to do is they have to upload the PDF of their final grades for that quarter. And it's a zero point assignment, and all the grade book administrator has to do is to go in and literally use SpeedGrader to check it to check it and then check it off. And then now our grade book administrator has a record of who's turning in, who has issues with their grade book because she can she can put in, like, that, comment and the SpeedGrader just says, Hey, I need to see you, or, hey, you need to we do this because it's not right, or she can follow-up with the people who haven't done it. And then it's a targeted, right? It's not a blanket like, hey, if you haven't done your grades, you don't need your grades now, which, you know, when you do those kinds of blanket announcements, it gets ignored by everybody.

Right? But now you the person can actually go and say, look, miss Lam, didn't turn in your grades, and they were due, like, three days ago, and I need you to turn in your grades now. So that's that's the great thing about that. And again, that these are like school administrators who may not necessarily be very well versed in all of Canvas, but they can at least get to the speed grader how to get to the speed grader. They know how to look at it. They know how to mark it as done.

They know how to follow-up with the teachers that need to. On the student's side, which finally just loaded Oh, now I have to click on that part. What we do actually is really cool. So one of things that we used to do with graduation was, we made our students right on a no card, their name, and how there was for supposed to pronounce their name. Which was great if the student's name was John Smith, but not so great if the student had a name that was spelled a particular way, but it wasn't pronounced that way.

So I have a I have a colleague and her name's pronounced Ashling, but it's spelled a I s l I n g, which is again, like there's a, you know, you look at the naming, that's not what you're think. Ashling is not what you're thinking of first. Right? So, the other problems with the note cards were, one, handwriting. Some of our students have terrible handwriting. And then two, because there were no cars, they tend to get lost because you give them to the presenters, and then the presenters have to look through it, practice a pronunciation, and then sometimes the presenters lost a card or two.

Right? So, what we did was we shifted and pivoted over to using canvas to record names. So Canvas has this awesome ability to submit audio files, right? And all the kids have chromebooks. So what we do is we make an announcement and we target it just for our top graders. And we say, pronounce your name. That's it.

Like, it's very simple. We I want you guys to record your full legal name as it is in our system. And what's and what's amazing about this is that basically, for the most part, all of our students comply because they do this. We set this up before the first day of school. We tell them during the homeroom section they get their schedules and they find out about, you know, like, hey, you know, welcome to, you know, it's a school year, blah blah blah blah blah, then they do this.

And it doesn't take them long. A lot of them have already done audio recordings in other classes. So again, this is nothing new. This is really, again, just use what's baked into Canvas already to facilitate these kinds of operations. And what this has done has it it's made graduation so much better because our presenters don't have to look at note cards.

They don't have to read what's on the note card. All they have to do is just go into SpeedGrader, listen to the the pronunciation, maybe make some notes for themselves, but it's all there, and they're not gonna lose anything because it's all there in this. And the other thing too is that, one of the things that I did was I taught our our our counselors how to use the SpeedGrader to determine who hasn't turned it in. So they look at they they sorted by alphabetical order. They look at their alphabet, like, bracket, and they see who hasn't turned it in, and then they can follow-up with the student, which is more effective.

Because when they hear from an adult directly, instead of a general, hey, you didn't turn this in, turn this in, they're more likely to actually comply and do what they need to do. So it's just kind of going to speak or so I can kind of just show you. I'm not gonna show you the grade verification one because actually has student data. This one technically has student data, but it's it's not like grades. It's just their it's just SpeedGrader.

Okay, about fifteen minutes left. Actually, I'll probably skip this. Sorry. It's not loading, so I'm gonna go back to this. And go through what I have.

Okay. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the technical side at the very end, because I kinda don't wanna bore you with that. But I do wanna talk about leadership. Right? So one of the biggest things as a technology leader, I've learned is about it's communicating and involving stakeholders. That's kind of one of the biggest things in any kind of leadership, position.

But how do you promote? How do you talk to your school leadership team about the Right? How did you get them? Who may they may not use canvas. They may not even know what canvas is. Maybe they've seen it in their professional learning, but they may not know the power that Canvas has. Right? Like you guys do. So how do you promote this to our school leadership team.

It's all about communication. Right? The the purpose of having the hub is about communicating, effectively and clearly to our students and our staff, what the expectations are at the school, what is happening at the school, and what we need you to do to make our school better. Right, or make something more efficient. So, and especially with remote learning days, which I think are gonna be more common. Wanna communicate to students in a timely manner using Canvas, in conjunction with all the other communications tools, can make sure that your message gets across.

Again, targeted announcements. I'm all about being like, hey, ninth graders. You gotta know that we're going to do the Stanford or whatever. On this day, right? So that it's directed to students that need that information, and not to everybody which then can cause people to, students to ignore it. Right? And again, it's when I say students here, I'm also thinking of staff as well.

So that again, it's generally the same. So you can replace student with staff and have the exact same thing. One place to direct students for information, that's kinda big. Right? So you don't wanna have a different workflow for accessing information about the school. Like your school handbook and information about mental health resources.

You wanna direct everybody to the same place, to the same workflow so that when you say something in your class or even on your announcements or to your school leadership. It's on canvas. They know, like, it's on the canvas hub that they know where to go. That it's automatic for them. The other thing too is all about, like, efficiency.

You wanna make things more efficient. There's not enough time in day to do whatever we need to do. So let's just use just use this tool to collect all of these things and make sure that it's all in one place, have that accountability there, with the emails, mesha students who, using SpeedGrader to check things or listen or, like, access the material that you need. Use use all what canvas has. Right? So here's the kind of like technical part.

Right? So, what I said, hey, how do we load these students into this hub. Most of the time, your students aren't enrolled in your sis system. If you're using a sis, sync, they're enrolled in homerooms and not necessarily in, a way that's like sensible. Right? You could make a class that has sections for ninth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade, and twelfth grade. But when you have three thousand students at a school, that's not necessarily the greatest way to do it.

And you have to assign a teacher, which is also not great way to do it. So, I I I've talked to a few people and they said they said that they do that at their districts when they come to these kind of things. It's not necessarily feasible for us. So some ways to kind of load students into the hubs. The first one is just manual enrollment, which is what I used to do.

So I used to pull from our system, export of all students at the school. I would sort it by Greylow and then I would literally copy their ID numbers, paste them into the box and then hit, like, you know, add them, and then it would take them an add them. Now, this caused some issues. One issue is when you do a manual enrollment like that, they had they get an invitation. They get an invite.

And sometimes the students don't click on those invites, they leave them up forever. It's this big nice green bar at the top. Decoration, right? Gotta have some color in in in Canvas. So that's what I used to do. And that caused issues.

One, timeliness. Two students didn't click on the invite, so they, like, basically, feigned ignorance. They were like, I didn't know that was happening. And so you know, that didn't quite work. The next thing I did, I'm gonna skip Sys and ports for a moment.

The next thing I did, remember I worked at a school. The next thing I did was API calls. So I actually learned the Canvas API. I taught Python. I used to teach Python before I became the technology facilitator as with, you know, Java and JavaScript and all of that.

So I knew how to use the API. So I learned the API I used Canvas API. I made it API calls. I did the export, and then I would process it through Python. And then would enroll them.

And what was great about that is that when you do it through the API, you can actually do a skip invite, so it automatically adds them in, which is great. Except then I found out that. For some reason, our instance was set up at that time. I was not the Canvas admin. At at that time, instance was set up where I can enroll kids, but I couldn't unenroll the kid, like, except through the UI.

So I have to go in and I had three thousand students at my school so that didn't quite work. So I just added the students in, and then, I I encountered some problems too. One problem was I had no way to because I couldn't de enroll them using the API. I had no way to unenroll the students that had graduate it. So what I did was I concluded their section and then, like, it was a mess because then I had, like, two or three sections that had students that didn't go to the district in more.

So that didn't quite work. And I wasn't quite up to speed with system ports. I didn't have a friend up in, the district at that point where I could call them and say, hey, I can make a system port file for you. Can you put it in? I didn't have friends like that. So but anyway, some of these things, if you are a Canvas admin, you can use SIS imports.

If you're not a Canvas admin, make your Canvas admin, your friend. So you can call them up and have them do a system port. The system port is just a flat file for those of you who don't know. It's just a CSV file that has fields You basically filled in the fields. You put in the course ID.

You make them a student, and then you, like, put it into Canvas and Canvas does the rest for you, and it automatically doesn't enrollment. It does the whole, like, I don't need to invite the kid and all of that. So, there's different way days. I think on my GitHub, I do have the API version of how I did it. When I became the Canvas admin at the District and I kind of like sort of half managing the course, before I let it go.

I actually did API calls to do a diff and actually, like, de enrolled the students that didn't go to the school anymore and enrolled the students that weren't already in the course, which was really cool. So that's kinda like the the the hard part of this. Right? The part of it is how do you load the students? In. Okay. So last thing before I have ten minutes, so I wanna really quickly talk about, like, this is kind of a lot of information.

You may be already doing it. Maybe this is new to you, but one of the things I always think about, and Ariana Huffington actually did it in her keynote today was about starting small. So how where do I start? Where do I start if this is brand new to me? Right? How do I how do I get this hub up and running? The first thing is that one the first thing is that the hub is like the hubs that I have are, they're already built, like you can see it's pretty much complete and is on about updating the data, you may have a new hub. And so think about starting off really simple. Maybe it's not putting all the information in, maybe putting the salient information in, maybe making an announcement, or make a simple announcement, or use it just for announcements, and then build up the content in there there.

Or think about the one thing that your students have to submit at your school, like graduation names, or maybe certificates to or by students or staff. Okay. And put it in the hub. Make make the hub just that one thing. And start directing people there.

And then start building up the content. Hey, you guys already know it's the same course that you do the grade verification in. That's where our staff handbook is. Or graduation name. Hey, kids, you know, our announcements are all in the graduation name.

The print that that course that you do your graduation name in there. That's where we're gonna start doing our announcements that we do on the intercom. You know, start small. And then also build the hub as you go. Right? Don't think don't start big and try to stuff everything in, because oftentimes what happens is you forget something, and then you're like, oh, man, I didn't do put that in.

It's not perfect. Build it as you go, start with the function, start with, like, doing these things and then make it pretty. You don't have to make it pretty all at once. So at least I don't. I have some HTML skills, but I still use, particular tools to help me out with building light courses.

So, you know, it's not, it's not always gonna be perfect. The other thing I wanted, you'll get a slide I think you get the slide deck with this. I do have a template. Actually, that's in commons. That's kind of like really simple.

It only uses canvas off. So there's nothing in there that's, like, proprietary or not open source. I actually used the icon maker to make icons, which I thought, like, I thought the icon maker was kind of like chintzy at first, and then I've started making icons with it. And I'm like, oh my god. This is actually really cool.

So it's great. Made some icons on the template. It is in common. It should be available to everybody. No matter what you're in senses.

And it has some temp suggestion modules that I think are kind of like important. And then also a sample assignment, so kinda start doing kind of what I've been doing at Shawamac, with these hubs. So, let's we see. That's a really good question. Sample School Canvas Hub.

So yeah, it's just like really quick stuff, just like student code of conduct hand media center. I my one of my best friends is, is a librarian, and she ran our media center. She loved, like, making that those resources got used, club information. So maybe, like, you know, hey, these are the clubs that we offer, and then also senior graduation information. And then the assignment I think in here is just that name recording that I had made, for your for your seniors, but you can also use it for like eighth grade graduation.

Your eighth graders know how to record. They're TikTok. So, so things like that. So that's basically the a template. It's on as I said, it is on comments.

And then, again, I wanna say, like, reiterate Like, perfect is the enemy of good. I have to say that to myself because I'm kind of one of those people that's like, I really am a perfectionist. But perfect is the enemy of good get your hub to where it's functional and then kind of build upon it as the years go. The other thing I I really wanna suggest too is the reason why wanna talk to your school leadership is to have leverage your school staff to help you with your content. Right? The principal is making announcements in the staff hub.

The us, the secretaries are helping out with announcements. The, you know, your admin, my admin on my previous school, they're an other admin at Charlotte Mac are helping out with content that is relevant for their teachers. And they you can and and again, it's it's a simple ask. This is how you make a page. This is how you type things in the page.

This is how you add an image or a link and just start there. And then there with that, when you're leveraging your school step, staff to help with content, then they're getting better with canvas. Very slowly. You're teaching them how to use canvas and they see the value of canvas. So, they're they're using, they're wanting to learn, eventually, learn more about how to use Canvas for other things, like observing teachers.

This one's not working, but does anybody have any questions? We have, like, four minutes left. So if you have any questions, questions? Yeah. Yeah. And that's a really that's a really good idea. So, utilizing your students to make the student hub and maintain it is a really good idea if that's something that, you know, you trust your students to do.

The reason why we didn't have our students do it is because, when you give them the teacher role, we have some customizations that will, if they have the teacher role, it presents them with the teacher, like, resources, and we don't really wanna have students have access to those. But I think in hindsight, like, or now as I move forward, it'd be soul Canvas admin, I might wanna make a role that's kind of like student advisor or something like that where a student can be in a course without being labeled as the teacher and not triggering those customizations on our instance. Yeah. I one of the things that I'm planning to do is kinda look at our our roles as a district and see, like, if I can what we can change and what we can give because we do have a lot of students who are, kind of outside of this hub system. We have a lot of students who are, like, in classrooms tutoring students.

And so we wanna be careful about student data and all of that. So, but that's a really I I love that. I love that you guys have been doing it ready. We're kind of, like, still kind of working through our, like, little canvas instance and kind of building from the schools. So a lot of our high schools do this hubs, and a lot of our middle schools do like a staff hub, and a lot of schools actually do staff hubs.

But we we wanna kind of bring it all together. And so I love that you guys are already doing it. So I might wanna connect with you and talk. Yeah. But you could still link your yeah.

Yeah. You could still link those OneDrive resources. So, like, you know, we still we still have, Right. So you're yeah. So we still have, like, the staff share drive.

We use Google. We also have one drive but most of our teachers use Google. We have a staff share drive. But oftentimes, like, again, when you have a, my my Google is pretty cluttered and a lot of staff members, especially if they're new, don't even know what it is, what the shared drive is. So having it in a place where it's centralized, but then also extending it to utilizing the canvas features to enhance communication, collect items share information.

And oftentimes, it it you, yeah, she wanna put everything in OneDrive, but then sometimes like things in the district things that are, like, at your state level, aren't in those resources. So you wanna have one place so that they know where to go. So, again, it when it's when someone says, like, our culture at my old school, and a culture at a lot of our schools in in at central office is all about it's in the canvas hub for blah, and they know exactly where to go. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. That's a really good question. So it's actually a setting. So if you go to settings, my Internet's a lot better. It is six zero one.

So if you're like, I need to go get dinner, you can go get dinner now. I'll still be here to answer questions. I'm trying to load my settings. It is a setting that says, recent announcements on the page. Under more options, which a lot of people don't realize is there.

And you go here show recent announcements on course homepage. And then, you can set how many announcements you wanna put on the home page. I set it to two or three. I really do not recommend going last three because those sometimes those announced like you saw the announcements are pretty large. So, and that allows that allows students to when they go to the the course, they can see those announcements, but they also know to click on announcements to see the rest of them.

So that's that's a option that's there. If you now again, if you if you're a Canvas admin law those options and they don't let you do that. Make friends with your Canvas admin, so that you can do that. But, we have a lot of, at least it's a mech. We have a lot of our options unlocked.

The only thing that, the only thing that we don't allow our teachers to do, unfortunately, is when they make a sandbox, change sandbox name, which is because of how the subaccount's made, but they can do all of these options. Yeah. Thank you. Say that have the admin give you permission, do they have to give the whole district permission? Can they just apply, like, in my school? Yeah. They can localize your school through the subaccount.

So like, as I said, we, put the hub courses in the subaccounts so that the if for some reason there is a a position change or something like that, or or someone leaves and burns a bridge, we can still give people access as root admin can still add them in into the course. So they they can, independently do it. Because, again, we'd we'd we're more than one canvas admin at such a large district with a hundred and eighty schools. We try to kind of, like, you know, give a little bit of power to, the school like contacts so they can independently manage your own courses, instead of having to keep putting tickets in to me and asking me to change something. So yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah. You just go. Again, and then it depends on how your your subaccounts are structured. I can kind of show you ours, because this it's a mess.

The please don't use this as an example of a great subaccount structure. If it will load. So, basically, we have Droot account. We have this, which is all our SIS courses, but we don't change the we don't recreate subaccounts for SIS courses. We just put them in when they're loaded in, but we have them high school.

And then you can go down. You can see all the subs the high schools in order. And then we also have, digital citizenship in zone subaccount, and then, manually created courses. This is this is not good. Okay, guys.

This is not a model for how you should do subaccounts. If you're Canvas admin. But then, like, we have abandoned courses, archive courses, and then departments. And so, like, yeah, it it it for a district like ours, I don't know. Oh, these, oh my god.

I might need to fix those. For our for our district for a district our size, you know, we we have to do it this way, but it also because of Canvas' limitations. It makes subaccount like traversal really occult. So as a Canvas admin, I memorize, the PowerSchool account, which is fourteen forty six. And then I memorize some other accounts that I usually go into.

So I could just access them directly instead of having to try to look for them. So, yeah. But as I said, this is not a model for how you should do several counts. But You guys have any other questions? Yeah. Right here, and it's only to your twelfth graders.

So you can do that. Now for teachers, what I recommend you could it depends on how big your course is. So you can actually manually assign everybody in the people page to a section. So you can go to people. And, if it will load, you can assign them.

It doesn't quite work students, like, because that's too many students, but you can go here and I can say, Taylor Abbott right here. I can edit her sections, I can, you set up the sections first, and then you could give the sections to that person. So if yours hub course is relatively small. You could do it that way. The other way to do it is through API calls or through assist import.

I would say the system port is probably the ease if you have less than, like, five hundred people, system port, no. This is a big it's a big one. It's a thousand. Holy crap. Okay.

I would still do a sis import, but I would I would say, like, you know, set some time aside to kind of, like, make sure like, everything set and talk to your Canvas admin about that. That's all. Oh, okay. Okay. So I would do Like, when we looked at your numbers, we're like, wow.

Okay. Someone actually r number because there's only three of us for a thousand teachers -- Yeah. -- for eighteen hundred. Eighteen thousand students. And then I could run queries in our assist to -- To do it? -- to generate students.

Yeah. I just figure out what what staff fields I would use since December, we have a great That's hard. Have -- Yeah. -- information in these tables. So, okay.

Yeah. But if you Let's read your email. So you might get, you know, emails from us. Yeah. Here, you can, I have I I use a economic like, it's not oh, you just scan the card or I could tap it? Yeah.

I they don't print out, like, cards for people at central office anymore, unless you're, like, director and above. So, so I've got bad, and it's it's like twenty bucks. It's, a dot card. And, it it's like a LinkedIn page It's a page that has all your contact info. I could add my website, it has my GitHub, it has my, email.

If you need any advice on how to do it, or, like, I can maybe I wanna know how to get that. Oh, it's called a dot card. So look dot card. Yeah. D o t and then card.

Okay. Yeah. And as I said, it's twenty bucks. So it's, like, it's super cheap, and it's not a subscription by any means. And I probably should, like, be a like, social media influencer for them or something like that, because I've been parroting this around and people are like, where did you get this? What is it? And I'm like, it is the coolest thing ever.

But yeah, like talk to me like you you for something like for a thousand, you could still do a SIS import. I mean, I did API calls but that's because, my Python code is actually done, it it's concurrency. So I run multiple API calls at the same time. So I run like five at a time, and it it finishes, and then I do a next five. And it makes it go faster.

But if you're if you're a little, like, shy or you're not necessarily a Python person and the system ports are great because then you could just do, CSV file, and then use, if you're doing queries, you could probably use a database to kind of, like, do a diff on it, and then only change what you need to. Yeah. So but I can I can always advise you on how that that it works, of advice on how to set it up, announcements, anything like that? Let me know. Yeah. Excellent job. Thank you.