Updating widget in Canvas homepage?

[Nmanley]

Hi everyone. I'm an Instructional Designer at a university, and I'm working with a professor to create an online Latin course. She wants her students to be exposed to new Latin words on a daily basis, and would like the course homepage to display a new Latin vocabulary word every single day (like a Word of the Day reveal). I suggested this could work in announcements, but she doesn't want to go in that direction. 

I would like to build this out for her, but I'm struggling a bit on ideas on how this would work. Is there anything capable within Canvas of updating the homepage like this, or would I need to embed some external source? 

Thanks so much!

[NoahBoswell · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nmanley ,

Thank you for posting on the Instructure Community!

While I agree with you that Announcements would be a great way to achieve this (especially because the teacher can choose the content / words being displayed, when they appear, etc.), there are a couple of things that you could possibly do to achieve this, and the first thing that I'd try to do would be to see if there are any apps or platforms that your school pays for / has access to that would be able to provide you with embeddable lessons or vocabulary words that would work inside of Canvas, or you can even go on other websites that you don't necessarily have to pay for and see if they have embeddable daily vocabulary words that would also work with Canvas. Do note, that while Canvas does support several embeddable resource types, there are some where the platform gets picky and doesn't load it correctly. We've had that issue with embedding resources from other sites, ourselves.

The only other thing I would think to do would be just manually updating the home-page each day with a new word. The advantage to doing this instead of using another platform would be that the teacher would be able to choose and control what words would actually appear, and could ensure that the content being displayed would be beneficial towards what the students are currently learning in class.

I hope that this helps a little bit! Always feel free to reach out with any additional questions or concerns.

All the best,
Noah

[Nmanley]

Thank you so much! This gives me a lot of new ideas!

[NoahBoswell]

Glad to help!

[dbrace]

Hi @Nmanley,

In my opinion, the easiest way to build this out would be:

1. create a Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint Online presentation/slideshow and make it "public"
2. create a Canvas page (designing it however you/they want)
3. get the embed code for the presentation from Google slides or Microsoft PowerPoint Online
4. embed the code into the Canvas page

If you or the instructor want the "Word of the Day" to be featured prominently, I would:

1. set the Canvas page as the course's home page
2. on a daily basis, the instructor would go to the presentation in Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint Online and update the slide

An upside to that method is that the instructor has flexibility with how to design the slide. A downside to that method is that the instructor cannot plan in advance.

An upside to using announcements (what you would recommend) would be that the instructor can plan ahead-of-time. A downside to using announcements would be that the instructor would need to create multiple presentations in Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint Online and use different embed code for each announcement.

Maybe someone else has another suggestion but this is the best that I got, without using (potentially) more complicated options.

-Doug

[Nmanley]

Oh, that's really clever. I like that suggestion a lot and I'll bring it up with her. Thanks so much!