Documenting Elementary School Student Work and Storage Limits

[jay_bachhuber]

Hi everybody, we're a new K-6 online school using Canvas. Handwritten work is important to our curriculum and pedagogy and necessary for our young students who can't type. As such, for assignments, we're having students photograph their work on paper and submit the .JPG's. We're also having students record videos of themselves reciting poetry, answering questions, and doing other things. Unfortunately, this is causing us to quickly approach our storage limits. Parents are uploading multiple 3 MB smartphone photos of worksheets every day, and this is clearly unsustainable. 

My question is: how are other elementary schools handling assignment submissions? If you are having students take photos, is there a way to compress or export the images after a week or two? I'm very interested to hear what solutions you've come up with. Thanks. 

[LesliePerrigo]

I am teaching virtual K this year and am continually exploring options for assignments.  My students love the external tool: Flipgrid for video recording.  When the app is added as an external tool and then created in Canvas student videos are stored on Flipgrid and not Canvas.  I have also used KAMI to allow students to complete assignments in a pdf.  They can edit and submit on the computer and the page is saved to my teacher Google Drive account. 

[jay_bachhuber]

Thanks for these suggestions! We use Canvas Studio for video submissions, and that's worked well. I've had a couple teachers mention KAMI, but I'll have to look into it more closely. @Chris_Hofer, maybe I've been imagining a problem we're not actually going to run into. I'll read the documentation you linked to and speak with my colleague who's more knowledgeable about the back end. 

Cheers,

Jay

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi there, @jay_bachhuber ...

I'm in Higher Ed, but I thought I'd chime in here.  It sounds like there may be a little confusion on how storage of files works as it relates to assignment submissions.  According to this Guide, How do I view my user files as a student? - Canvas Community, when a student submits a file as part of a Canvas assignment, those files are stored in a "Submissions" folder within the student's user "Files" area of Canvas.  Although each user gets a default of 50 MB for file storage, file submissions for Canvas assignments do not count towards that quota.  This is confirmed in the linked guide by the statement, "Files that have been submitted as assignments and graded discussions do not apply to the user quota" under "View User Files".  Student files for Canvas assignments should not be saving to the course "Files" area of a course...only to a student's personal "Files" area.  So, I am a bit curious as to where you are seeing that you are reaching a quota in your course(s).

I hope this will help a bit.  Sing out if you have any other questions.  Looking forward to hearing back from you.