Canvas Teacher

UPDATED REVIEW: Canvas has fixed the problem and the Canvas Teacher’s app works wonderfully. As before iPadOS 13, it is easy to use to grade student essays or contact students. With this fix, I now give it a five-star review. It took a while, but... Well done, Canvas!!! UPDATED REVIEW: I have spoken to several Canvas people and have been told Canvas is aware of the app crashing with iOS 13 or iPadOS 13 and they are working on an updated version of the app. I was told by one of their L2 engineers that he could not give me a date for when the new app version will be released. Until it is released, my one-star review must stand. (Why is it taking Canvas so long to fix this problem?) PREVIOUS REVIEW:This was a great app until IOS 13. Since then, I cannot leave a comment within a highlighted section of text for a student paper because the app crashes —every time. My problem was reported to Canvas, and I get responses from their support staff as though they do not know what is going on. So I will tell Canvas what is going on: Your Teacher App is creasing after IOS 13 came out. Not that hard to understand (Canvas support people actually asked me for my “crash logs” from my iPad). Please fix this! If Canvas cannot fix this, the app is worthless and teachers would be better off going back to the desktop version. What a shame.

I like having students complete both peer and self reviews. I love the peer review assignment option through assignment pages. For the purposes of the classes I teach I would like use this function to assign students to as reviewer of their own submissions. I attempted to do this but noticed their own names are not an option when manually assignment peer reviews. Perhaps there is another way to do this that I have not figured out yet? If not, I would LOVE if such a function can be added so students can engage in a self review process with all the same editable functions that are available in the peer review option. I would also love for all the rubric descriptions to be available in the canvas app. Right now only the general category description is available but even then, no consistently. I can see it for some of my assignments but not all. It would be nice if both General descriptions as well as the descriptions by point distribution were available. I have young children at home and often find myself grading at all hours of the day and night based on my infant and toddlers eating and sleeping schedules. Not having access to full rubric details from my phone slows up my progress when I am trying to take advantage of these random opportunities to grade while feeding our putting my kiddos to sleep. Otherwise I’m loving the app!!

Overall, this is a solid app. However, it seems the developers did not take into account that we use this app to check-in on our courses while we’re on the go. We do not use it to facilitate our courses. Accessing your course through a mobile browser may be a better option depending upon what you’re trying to do. - There is no ability to mark a message or discussion post as unread in the app. Once you open or view it, it cannot be marked as unread. If I don’t plan on responding at that very moment, I have to make a separate reminder to check it when I return to the desktop. I’ve basically stopped accessing messages and discussions through the app for this very reason. (In most cases, I’m not going to respond as soon as a student messages me, but I do want to read their message. Marking it as unread allows me to see the notification on the desktop where I prefer to respond.) - The actual text from sent and received messages cannot be copied. Not being able to copy a portion of a previous message I have sent is frustrating. I frequently send the same explanations for assignments, etc. Having the ability to copy a portion of a message for another email - when I’m on the go - seems like an oversight on the developers’ behalf. - To be continued...

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My course is structured around many team project submissions. When I select an assignment for grading, as I expect, I see a graphic with the number of submissions graded, the number in need of grading, and the number not submitted. When I select the middle option, need grading, I get a list of the submissions. When I select team one, I get a Forrest Gump box of chocolates experience—a team submission appears, just not the one I selected. So I select done, and try another submission. Same issue, the same team submission reappears—again, not the one I selected. So I give in and grade the random submission. I click done, and note it is off the needs grading list. I select another submission and get the same submission I just graded, only this time without a grade. Darn. I click done and then back to the assignment submission summary. I note that one assignment is showing up as graded. I click on it, confirm it is the random submission I graded previously. I open it and confirm it has a grade. Click done, go back to summary, click on needs grading, select a submission, and now I either get a new random submission to grade OR the original random submission reappears—without a grade... this is not acceptable. The system worked fine 2 weeks ago and is now squirrelly. The iPad makes marking up reports so easy, but this is defeated if I can’t access the submission I want to grade!

I have been waiting for the ability to annotate student papers with my Apple Pencil for a long time. I'm so excited about that and it seems to work pretty well. I have lost, though, the ability to leave voice or media comments from my iPad. That is a feature I use with every paper I assign, so I really hope that comes back soon. I also had a hard time getting a grade to save. This particular assignment I was just marking rough drafts as complete or incomplete. I hit the + to add a grade, selected "complete" from the menu, but then had to push the + again to save it. It took me a while to figure out why nothing was saving. It seemed a little awkward. I like the direction this app is going, but I had to go back and reinstall the old SpeedGrader app in order to accomplish what I needed to get done. EDIT AFTER SOME MORE USE: I also realized after grading a whole batch of essays that some of my handwritten annotations are missing! There are times when only a few words of a whole sentence are there when I go back in or when students look on their end. NO!! Waste of time!!