Online learning platforms rank as one of the most popular digital tools to emerge in the 21st century. They allow students the chance to access class materials from wherever they have an Internet connection and give teachers creative freedom to develop lesson plans. Canvas is unlike any tool they've had available to them before.
Fresno Pacific University offers teachers the chance to earn professional development credit while learning about online learning platforms in the Teaching With Canvas course. The course focuses on training teachers to use the online platform Canvas in the classroom.
Fresno Pacific University offers the Teaching With Canvas class online as part of its Continuing Education programs for teachers. The Canvas class has proven enormously popular.
“Loved this class! I'm so happy I was alerted to it and glad I took it,” wrote a teacher from Wisconsin who reviewed the program. “One of the most directly helpful continuing education courses I have taken. It is so nice to learn things that can be immediately used, and the format, pacing, etc. was great.”
What Canvas Can Do
Canvas is a type of Learning Management System (LMS) that is free for teachers. An LMS is a computer system that creates an online digital learning environment for students. Users praise Canvas for its ease of use, mobile-friendliness, dependability and time-saving features.
Canvas is the most used LMS in North America, with more than 30 million users, according to IBL News, which writes about online education.
Like many computer software systems, Canvas comes with features not everyone knows how to access and use. The Fresno Pacific University course educates teachers not only on what the system can do but also offers practical steps for implementing Canvas in the classroom.
Benefits of Canvas For Teachers and Students
According to parent company Instructure, Canvas offers many features that make it better than the competition, including an easy-to-use interface, a dashboard page that quickly summarizes assignments and other information and support for media content.
Canvas also offers the cloud, giving teachers a secure digital home for all the course content that students need to access. The program allows students to access their grades at any time and see when they are updated. Students can upload assignments directly to Canvas, eliminating paperwork for teachers.
Students can communicate through chat and participate in classroom discussions via online message boards. Teachers can create collaborative spaces for students where they can work on projects together and upload resources in real-time.
The Fresno Pacific University Teaching With Canvas Course
For educators who want to know how to teach with Canvas, the Fresno Pacific Teaching With Canvas courses gives them all the information they need. When teachers leave the course, they will be prepared to use Canvas in the classroom.
The course guides teachers through how to set up a Canvas course, how to create content within the course and how to manage student submissions and grades.
Jordan Samsonas, a middle school teacher, leads the class. Teachers can sign up for the course at any time - it is self-paced. Once you have signed up, you have one year to complete the course.
In another review of the course, a teacher from Missouri pointed out the practical nature of what Fresno Pacific University offers with the Teaching With Canvas course: “Loved the course. It was a practical and useful course to help me utilize Canvas in my classroom.”