Setting up a class for the whole school.

[blees]

Has anyone set up a class for the whole school (High School) and used to send and store school wide information?  We are just starting and would like any advice for setting this up.

[kona]

 @blees ​, yes, we have every student added to our Online Orientation course in Canvas and once they finish the Orientation they are automatically added to the Canvas Student Resources course. This allows us to message all students through Canvas, as well as have a College-wide Calendar. Over all it works really well. Do you have any specific questions about setting it up?

[blees]

What features do you use? We have been using a web portal for school wide information, forms etc. Do you store documents that would be relevant for the whole school and if so, where to keep them?

Sincerely,

Robert C. Lees

Robert C. Lees

Assistant Principal/Admissions

4171 Fruitville Road

Sarasota, FL 34232

Phone: 941-371-4917

Email: blees@cmhs-sarasota.org<mailto:blees@cmhs-sarasota.org>

Fax: 941-371-6924

Website: www.cmhs-sarasota.org<http://www.cmhs-sarasota.org/>;

Cardinal Mooney Catholic High School provides a quality education centered in Gospel values.

[kona]

We have all sorts of resources: technology reference/resources, Canvas specific resources/information, Institution specific resources/information. And yes, this is campus wide information that we wanted everyone to have access to. 🙂

[principal]

When the new Conversations came along and suddenly prevented teachers and/or students from messaging anyone outside their own course, our CSM suggested we could set up a Homeroom course to bring back the functionality lost that we had with the old Conversations.  We put all teachers and students in Homeroom, and this way anyone in the school can message anyone else in the school.  Also, students start discussions in Homeroom on any topic they want, so it's a place for them to interact.

We send out congratulations messages when students finish a course or grade level.  With Homeroom we could send them out to everyone again like we used to be able to, but a limitation of the new system was that messages going out to more than 100 students were automatically sent as individual messages, which creates a nightmare in the Sent box.  So we created two groups in Homeroom -- one for high school students, and one for middle school students and teachers.  (We're a small school, so each of those groups comes to less than 100.)  That way teachers can send out their congratulations messages and only have two messages in their Sent box -- one for each group.

[Stef_retired]

 @blees ​, great feedback thus far! Since this is increasingly looking like a prompt that won't elicit a single response that will stand out as uniquely "correct," I've changed the format to a discussion.

[scampo]

Hello Bob,  we are a K-20 School District and we have 1) whole district and then library sites for all our schools.  So these courses have full enrollments with parents as observers.  BUT here is what need to be done...

1.  Create a generic sub-account school and create the courses in that sub school account

2.  modify permission so that the INBOX / Conversation box is NOT available

3.  Then have your data person enroll accordingly.

If you leave the courses in the regular accounts,  kids start texting bothering each other across the district.

Stacey Campo

Poway Unified School District

[blees]

Thank you – great insights

Sincerely,

Robert C. Lees

Robert C. Lees

Assistant Principal/Admissions

4171 Fruitville Road

Sarasota, FL 34232

Phone: 941-371-4917

Email: blees@cmhs-sarasota.org<mailto:blees@cmhs-sarasota.org>

Fax: 941-371-6924

Website: www.cmhs-sarasota.org<http://www.cmhs-sarasota.org/>;

Cardinal Mooney Catholic High School provides a quality education centered in Gospel values.

[ddilkes]

We have three separate campuses in three separate cities, and have a course set up for each city. We have included things like our student contract, city specific details (maps, places of interest), who's who on that campus, booklists, information on school-wide events etc.

We do not use the assignments, quizzes, or other "teaching" tools, but the calendar and announcements have provided invaluable for sending information to the entire student body.

As mentioned by another response, this opens up messaging across the campus, which allows students to contact past teachers, the principal and vice-principals, or admin staff who are not enrolled in their academic courses, which has been really important for us.

[PaulAustinTx]

Since this thread is the top hit on Google for the topic "school-wide canvas course" I'm passing along a very helpful recent Canvas webinar with a school administrator. It covers a wide range of the the benefits they see from using school wide "courses" for staff and family communication.  We are looking at using it for more PD. This explains it well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLG_4Fc1SBk