Canvas Message Deleting--Monitoring Student Actions

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lthompson2
Community Participant

We're having a problem with Canvas Inbox/Canvas Messages, whatever it's called.  Our kids are using it essentially as a replacement for texting, which in itself isn't a major problem--whether it's passing notes, texting, emailing, writing on a Google Doc, we know they're sending messages.  The problem is that within Canvs, as an admin, we can't go in and see messages if kids have deleted them without sending a request to Canvas to get those, which might take a couple hours or a couple weeks.  The vast majority of the time, we don't need them or one of the kids still has the messages, but occasionally there is inappropriate behavior that we have to investigate, but as far as I can find within Canvas, there's not much I can do.  How do you all handle this?  Ideally, we'd have at least one of the following options, but I can't see any indication that we have any of these:

  • Ability to restrict student-to-student messages (right now, they can send to anyone they have a class with)
  • Admin Access to trash/deleted messages
  • Remove the ability to delete messages
  • Automatic blind copy all messages to a certain account (obviously, this would be the last choice, but it'd make messages available if need be).
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mzimmerman
Community Contributor

Hi @lthompson2 

I'm not sure it would entirely solve your problem, but you can restrict the ability of sending student-to-student messages by turning off the "Conversations - send messages to individual course members" permission for the student role.  

Screen Shot 2022-03-07 at 1.19.52 PM.png

 

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audra_agnelly
Community Champion

@lthompson2 as an admin, I typically go into the notification logs of the student who received the deleted message. In rare cases, students may have inbox notifications turned off, but this typically isn't the case and I can pull the screenshots of the message from there. There's no filter function on the page other than date range, I end up doing a CTRL+F for the sender or "sent you a message". But, yes, K12 admins need better inbox management tools, and being able to pull bullying and harrassing messages is just one of them.

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