Math Assignments/Tests on Canvas

[DavidRoss]

Hello K-12 Canvas World, 

One of the struggles that we face in promoting Canvas with our secondary math teachers is the daily use in a classroom.  We have teachers with daily access to Chromebooks for their students and are having a difficult time using their Chromebooks and Canvas to have their students turn in work that requires that the student shows their work.  This is especially true in trying the flip their test in an online format.  Does anybody have any tips/ideas for creating assignments and test on Canvas in a math classroom?  Thank you so much.

David Ross

Culver City Unified School District.

[kona]

DavidRoss​, what I've done for Statistics is have students take pictures of their work (or use a PDF converter app on their phone) and then upload this to the Assignment. It's not perfect and not sure what can/can't be done on a Chrome book, but in general it seemed to work ok and students didn't seem to mind it once they got use to it.

[DavidRoss]

Thank you Kona, That is a great idea. 

[clong]

Good Tip

This is what many of our teachers do as well.

Sometimes when they do that, there are issues with the picture sizes in SpeedGrader. If these submissions are viewed in Firefox it displays them so it fits to the size of the window. However, sometimes this isn't big enough to see the details. In other Browsers, it shows the picture in full resolution but then you need to scroll around a lot. So it's good to know there are two options. This is also why we should vote up ​.

[wgargaro]

Following

[kona]

You might also want to share this with the Teaching Math in Canvas​ group. They might have some creative ideas for this!

[DavidRoss]

Awesome, Thank you. I was pleasantly surprised that this group existed.

[pwalsh · Accepted solution]

We are just starting to experiment with this now. Our students will have iPads, which will have Notability. I realize that Notability is not available for Chromebooks, but with a quick search it looks like there are some apps that will let you annotate pdfs. For us, it looks like students will download the pdf, write on it, and then upload it back to Canvas for things we want to grade.

Doing some testing with another teacher it looks like this will work for us, though it may take some training for the students because it's a little clunky in the Notability->Canvas direction.

I think there's also an idea open for voting right now about annotating directly on pdfs from within Canvas, so you might want to search for that and vote it up.  Here it is: .

[sshumway]

I have students turn in weekly packets of teamwork problems so I can see their work.  For daily quizzes and weekly tests, I just have formula questions, and all they have to enter is the numerical answer.  This is mainly for the immediate feedback that it provides for the students.  Since the computer generates different values for retakes and neighbors, I can give them the answers to questions without ruining the learning experience for anyone.

[clong]

If you have not used Kami​ this would also be another great way for students to show their work. Basically they would write on top of a PDF or other doc and then turn in the URL to it.

Another idea would be to have students actually submit videos of them explaining how they do a few of the problems. They can use their phones to video record them as they solve the problems on paper or use the built-in Canvas video tool to record a narration of how they solved the problem.

[DavidRoss]

Thank you Chris,

I will definitely check out Kami.  That is a fantastic idea about having them explain their work through video. I haven't thought about that.