iOS beta users will be happy to hear that we released Canvas Teacher 1.2 to TestFlight this morning! If you're on our list of TestFlight users, you'll have received an email from TestFlight. Here's what we need you to break:
- Student context cards. From anywhere in the app (including from the new People list!), you can tap a student's avatar to view their context card. It's cool! Let us know what load times you're experiencing when launching a card. It shouldn't take more than a couple of seconds. You can also tap on an assignment from the context card to launch of submission preview in SpeedGrader. The context cards look like this:
- Audio/video comments in SpeedGrader. You can now add audio or video comments to a submission in SpeedGrader by tapping the "+" button from the Comments tab. There's a known issue where the sent video doesn't display properly in the comment stream until you navigate away from and then back to the comments tab, but recording, previewing and posting should all be working properly. The option to add audio or video looks like this:
- Attendance. If you've enabled the Roll Call LTI attendance tool in Canvas, you'll see an "Attendance" component added to your course components list in the teacher app. Once launched, you can tap on a student name to mark that student as present, absent, or late. We want to hear your feedback on load times and user experience with this component. Attendance in the teacher app looks like this:
You can also add attachments to announcements, discussions and inbox messages now.
So that's version 1.2!
What about 1.1, you say? iOS will be pushing a 1.1 version to stores which is everything mentioned above minus attendance. We need some more feedback on attendance before we make that available everywhere.
We have dreams for the attendance tool that haven't come to fruition yet. We want teachers to be able to set a phone or tablet at the front of the classroom that records attendance as students enter the room. We feel like it's technically possible today, and would be better than paper attendance, and shouldn't require schools to purchase any special hardware or adopt lengthy setup procedures. But the technology is still new, and not all smartphones have the right hardware, and not all kids have smartphones, so it'll be a minute before our dreams come true.
As usual with teacher app betas for iOS, you can send us feedback by taking a screenshot from anywhere within the app.
Android teachers - stay tuned, 1.1/1.2 will be out soon!
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