Recording Anecdotal Notes Visible only to co-teacher

[sylvia_b_greenb]

I want to be able to record observations and support notes for individual students that are attached to a specified assignment or quiz and have those be visible only to my co-teacher. For example, if a student required multiple verbal and physical prompts or if they struggled with a foundational skill related to the assignment, I want to document that as an anecdotal note that is attached to the assignment and only visible to myself and the co-teacher.

Is this feature built into Canvas? If not, then can we get it built into the system to make it more feature-friendly to a K-12 environment? Happy to beta test.

[kona]

 @sylvia_b_greenb , there are a couple of different options in Canvas, but none of them are tied to a specific assignment. They are the notes column in the gradebook (click the gear icon in Grades and click show notes column) and Faculty Journal (your Canvas Admin would have to get this turned on for your school, but it’s free). Yet, as previously mentioned, these are by student, but not by assignment and then by student. 

If you would like to recommend this as a new idea in Canvas you can do so in the Canvas Studio‌ area of the Community. 

Hope this helps!

Kona

[sylvia_b_greenb]

Thanks for your response. I looked into both of those, but at the K-12 level they're just not as useful as I want them to be. It really needs to be connected to the assignment in order to be useful and only visible to the coteachers for the specific course. Right now, we're using the internal email for this purpose, but it's a clumsy solution. I hope Canvas asks K-12 about this and is able to add it as a feature.

[kona]

 @sylvia_b_greenb , the best way to advocate for something like this is to create the feature idea here in the Community and/or communicate with your Canvas CSM about about (if you aren't a Canvas Admin, then you'd need the Canvas Admin at your school to do this for you).

If you're currently using Email, have you instead thought about using a Google sheet instead? My thought is that you could create a Google sheet with each student as a row and each assignment as a column (if you already have all your assignments for the course created in Canvas you could just download the gradebook for this information). You could then share the Google sheet between the two of you - even add it somewhere in the course for just the two of you to see - and you could add comments and information on this sheet so that way you could see it for every student and every assignment. 

Kona

[sylvia_b_greenb]

Kona,

Thanks for your reply. I will definitely look into requesting this feature. The Google Sheets idea is a good one, though I prefer to keep everything in the program.

[KristinL]

Sylvia - Do you and your co-teacher use modules to organize your work? Even if Modules is unpublished to your students (and families), you and your co-teacher could organize multiple note sheets alongside the assignments within a module. (How do I add an external URL as a module item?...and leave it unpublished!) You could also use the "indent" feature to keep things tidier as well.