Say a kid usually walks home from school, & they don't know there are thunderstorms outside, because they have been in class all day. So when the kid walks outside, they quickly get back inside, because it's raining outside. A worse case scenario is if another kid walks outside to walk home thinking it's just rain, but there is severe weather in the area, like a Severe Thunderstorm Warning or even a Severe Thunderstorm Watch, which puts the kid in danger. It's critical to know what the weather's like when there's weather problems. Getting back to the first kid, he calls his mom & dad to pick him up from school, but the parents work 30 min away, which turns into an hour because there is much traffic due to weather conditions. So the kid has to wait at the school building for an hour before his parents can pick him up. This situation could have been avoided if the kid knew what the weather was.
It would be nice if there was a small weather indicator somewhere in the dashboard. It could show the current weather & tomorrow’s weather. It would help students know what kind of clothes to wear the next day based on the temperature & weather, & it could help students know if they need to call their parents to pick them up if they usually walk home. It could get the location based on where the organization hosting their Canvas service is, as selected by the organization tech managers, or it could be a optional system where you type your location & you get your weather. You could partner with numerous companies, such as Weather Channel (website), Weather Underground (website), and Accuweather, among many others. For severe weather emergencies like a tornado warning, hurricane warning , & flood warning, I think it would be good to take a step further than the weather indicator that would be used for smaller things like severe thunderstorm warnings & heat advisories, because the former situations could be life-threatening. For those warnings, maybe there could be a banner scroll at the top of the webpage that would scroll consecutive times displaying the warning. Or it could be as simple as a pop-up displaying emergency information. Remember, the user would only get the weather related information if they or the district put in their location in the weather indicator system. Please consider my proposal. Thank you!
