Do you put your k-12 Curriculum In Canvas?

[BradMoser]

Any k-12 District using Canvas to house Curriculum for the district?

We left BYOC about two and half years ago. We created our own Google Site and then used Google Docs to house our pacing guides and curriculum resources. But it gets a little crazy and unorganized. Wondering if anyone has created curriculum for their subjects all in Canvas.

• How are you housing Curriculum in Canvas?
• What is your naming convention?
• How are you using Groups?
• How to you add new curriculum lessons?
• What would you do differently?

[tross]

We do post our curriculum in Canvas.  We put a custom link on our Help that points to a course.  That course has a menu teachers can use to get to the appropriate courses.  We have curriculum courses, administrator courses, technology courses etc.  Once they find the course they want, the course is self-enroll so teachers can join the course and put it on their dashboard.  Our Curriculum department owns their own courses as updates as appropriate.

[BradMoser]

Great idea about putting a custom link to the Main Curriculum and Instruction Course. We will have to do something similar. I also, like that you use Self Enroll for those courses. How do you keep students from joining those courses?

[tross]

We can't but in 3 years, we haven't had any.  We do have someone who watches.   Formatting differences on accounts between students and staff make it easy to scan the list

[mjoaquin]

I would love to hear more from others who have/are doing/talking/dreaming about housing their curriculum in Canvas. The hows, the whys, the super defined details about how you got this done.

[tross]

Sure.  When we were in our first year of implementation, we started working with our Curriculum Department.  The Director has been very supportive.  She and her team established a deadline for all curriculum to be in Canvas.  The first year they put it in Canvas, they kept it in the old place as well for transition.  This year, it is only in Canvas.  Each content area has a course.  They have separate pages and modules for each grade level.  The content area courses are all setup as self join.  The courses are linked in a course that is basically a menu course.   We created a custom Help link for the Menu Course.  So the teachers can click on Help and see an item Conroe ISD Professional Development and that takes them to the menu course.  Once they navigate to the content they need, they join the course so they can add it to their dashboard.

I am happy to answer any specific questions you have and you are welcome to contact me directly. 

[mjoaquin]

Teri, can you tell me why they opted for one course per content area with modules for each grade level, as opposed to separate courses for each grade level? Just wondering on the why. Is there anyway I could see a screenshot of this "the courses are linked in a course that is basically a menu course."  No content just the layout/design? I can totally understand if that is a no go, but thought I would ask!

Thank you again for sharing. I will probably reach out to you as well!

[tross]

Sure.   In hindsight we probably should have done one for each level (in our district Elementary is PK - 4, Intermediate 5-6, Junior High 7-8, and High School).  Some of the courses have gotten very large.  They liked this option because it was easier for them to maintain.

[tmercer]

I like that visual.  So in hindsight you would do one per grade level?

[msommer]

Also looking for some support/ideas/inspiration in this regard. 

[joseph_allen]

Our school district houses curriculum for each grade and course topic in Canvas.   We created "communities" for 1st grade, 2nd grade and so on through Elementary.  At the secondary level, we have topic communities such as secondary science, secondary math.  Any teacher can 'view' the content in those communities, or 'join' through self-enrollment which then enables all the communication functionality.  We require that teacher join or affiliate with communities that make sense for them and this is largely how we distribute new curriculum now by linking master curriculum courses from these communities.  We keep students out by enrolling all of teachers / staff in the communities page during the new hire process and although the underlying community pages are open (institutional restriction setting), teachers know not to share the URLs and we have not found any students in there yet.  

[BradMoser]

Joe, thanks for sharing. A quick follow up, do you have a all staff course that becomes the main website to access all the curriculum communities? Also, a thought I had to regulate who joins the community is to make it a moderate process, in other words, create a form that the user can complete and indicate which community(ies) they want to join and then you can manually add users to it. Just a thought. 

[joseph_allen]

Yes, we have one staff course that all staff are enrolled in.  There are currently about 11,000 participants in that course. That is one way to get at the curriculum communities.  The other way is there is a button that we make appear on the global nav button called "communities" for anyone with the teacher role.  That is done through Javascript.  You could definitely moderate who gets into a community, however with 10,000 staff, we want this to be as self-service as possible and not be in the business of doing transnational work. 

[BradMoser]

 @joseph_allen  Can you share how you do the javascript? I have not added any custom script to our account, but would love to see how you created that? 

[MattHanes]

There is probably a better way to do this but you can append to the end of the menu on the left using the following Javascript: 

$("#menu").append('<li class="menu-item ic-app-header__menu-list-item"><a id="ANY ID GOES HERE" href="URL GOES HERE" class="ic-app-header__menu-list-link"><div class="menu-item-icon-container" aria-hidden="true"></div><div class="menu-item__text">CUSTOM TEXT GOES HERE</div></a></li>');‍‍‍

There are three spots you must change in that code. 

1. Give an id for the menu
2. Give a URL to your course
3. Give custom text to show in the menu

The code above does not include an icon so it will just add a text link to the menu.

I didn't test this but I think you can make it show up only for admins and teachers by wrapping it in an if statement like the one below:

if (ENV.current_user_roles.indexOf("admin") >= 1 || ENV.current_user_roles.indexOf("teacher") >= 1){
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#menu").append('<li class="menu-item ic-app-header__menu-list-item"><a id="ANY ID GOES HERE" href="URL GOES HERE" class="ic-app-header__menu-list-link"><div class="menu-item-icon-container" aria-hidden="true"></div><div class="menu-item__text">CUSTOM TEXT GOES HERE</div></a></li>');‍‍
});
}‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

[joseph_allen]

Here is the JS code we used.  Sorry this doesn't format nicely in the discussion post here. 

// Community icon for teachers and admins       if(typeof(ENV) !== 'undefined' && (ENV.current_user_roles.indexOf('admin') != -1 || ENV.current_user_roles.indexOf('teacher') != -1) ){           var html = ''           html = ' <li class="menu-item ic-app-header__menu-list-item"> ' +                      ' <a id="global_nav_communities_link" href="https://community.canvaslms.com/courses/378/pages/canvas-communities" class="ic-app-header__menu-list-link">'+                     '     <div class="menu-item-icon-container" aria-hidden="true"><img src="https://canvasfiles.hcpss.me/images/new-ui-communities-icon.png"></div>'+                     '     <div class="menu-item__text">Communities</div> ' +                     ' </a>' +                 '</li>';           $('ul#menu').append(html);       } 

[MattHanes]

We do things very similar to tross's situation. Our school District has Content Specialists who created subject-specific courses that contain curriculum and pacing guides. I created a "Canvas Course Index" page in our Help menu that is only accessible by staff members. It is searchable and links to the Enroll page for each course. It looks like this:

Here is an example of the Homepage for one of the courses:

[tmercer]

Thank you for the visual!

[cjrusk]

 @MattHanes ‌ It was great working with your at #khaki17‌.

[mjoaquin]

To bring this back up, my district is going to visit with another district that houses their curriculum in Canvas on April 4th. I will share back highlights from our discussion if any one is interested. 

[nmduches]

Hello everyone! Our district currently has our K-5 ELA/Math/Science housed on Canvas. Each course is broken up by grade level. We uploaded our teachers from our SIS based on the classes they teach. For the resource teachers we generated a temporarily self-enroll code for them to join the various grade levels they needed. Then we shut the self-enroll code off since we are now house our district assessments in there as well.

 

The modules in each course is broke up by the four semesters we have. Included in each module is our curriculum maps, small group lessons, important dates etc. Then we break it down into weeks.

In each week, we  had our content expert teachers create lesson plans and resources. Our curriculum specialists vetted their resources before including them in our modules. I hope this explains how our district is utilizing Canvas to house our curriculum. Also, I want to mention that we also have made them interactive in which teachers can submit on the courses resources they are using that they would like to share with other teachers in our district. These resources are also vetted before posting on our modules. Next year we hope to have 6-12 curriculum housed on Canvas as well. We also hope to include professional learning courses that we will create for each subject linked onto their curriculum module. So it will be a one stop shop for their curriculum and professional learning needs for their grade level. We also hope to build some student-faced modules using the content and lessons from our curriculum.

[BradMoser]

Thanks Nichole, 

Why did you you decide to make separate classes for each grade level rather than one huge class?

[mjoaquin]

After our site visit yesterday I found that the school we went to see does everything through Canvas. Their teacher websites, curriculum, and instruction. 

On the curriculum side, K-2 are self contained classrooms, so they house all content areas in one course. I.E. Kindergarten would have icons for Math, Science, ELAR, and SS. 3rd and up have content specific courses that they join. These courses house their YAG, resources, snapshots, assessments, and they are working on building some exemplar lessons as well. 

That is the real detail I have now, I am waiting for more information in a follow up. 

[katy_escandell]

We are currently working on sharing our curriculum through the Canvas Commons. The curriculum yearly planning guides (YPGs) will be linked on Pages by grade level/content to their google doc and the model lessons will be built as free standing modules that teachers can in-port to their sandbox or PLC course (assigned by using our SIS) to review and then push to students.

[cjrusk]

We are a completely online K-12 school that is a division of a university. Currently, our students utilize Canvas exclusively without any outside textbooks with the exception of story books and novels for Language Arts/English classes. We have an open enrollment with start dates beginning every 2 weeks throughout the year.

• How are you housing Curriculum in Canvas?

The majority of our content resides completely in Canvas. We do store some images, game files, and videos in an Amazon S3 account.

• What is your naming convention?

Currently, we name the courses by discipline, teacher, and academic year: English 9 - Mrs. Smith - Academy 2016-2017. The SIS ID is aligned to our Banner numbering system so that our courses fit into the larger university system.

For the individual courses, we break everything down into 10 modules (36 weeks). Our numbering is simply module.week.item:  1.4.3 Sample Name (module 1, week 4, 3rd item for that week)

• How to you add new curriculum lessons?

We wrote all of the courses 2 years ago and actively update large scale changes every semester and make critical changes when needed.

• What would you do differently?

Well, we find that the Canvas rich text editor is lacking unless you want to dig into HTML and CSS. To help our courses look more professional, we are starting to integrate Articulate Rise into Canvas. 

[rislis]

So....I have read and reread your posts about housing your curriculum in Canvas. You have all given me some great ideas and we're going to jump in and try to incorporate as many of them as we can. 2 years later - would any of you change anything or offer new suggestions? Thanks!

[mjoaquin]

We are going in to year 2 of our Curriculum being housed in Canvas. We ended up creating a series of hidden subpages, linked by buttons to all curricular documents. 

[kristapenrod]

I'd love to chat with you on how this is going and see what your content looks like if you're willing to share. Please let me know- thanks!

[kristapenrod]

Hello,

I am resurrecting this thread from several years ago as our district is looking to make the move from housing curriculum in BYOC to Canvas. Currently our BYOC website is public-facing (anyone, district parent or not) can view our K-12 curriculum. Are there any districts out there that have used Canvas to house public-facing curriculum (course overviews, essential standards/learning targets, etc.?)

Appreciate any insight you can provide!