Canvas Parent 4+

Great app overall. These are the things I’ve noticed thus far and I hope this feedback is helpful. Some courses show in ascending order and some show in descending order by way of the date. It would be nice to see that each course only went one way or the other for searching purposes. Auto checks on the side of each finished assignment would be nice as well. Status seems to auto change to viewed on some if not most assignments but once data or uploads were entered by the student if that initiated an auto checking system I think both students and parents might find that helpful. I’m sure a lot goes into programming as it is and I just wanted to share what I felt is an honest review. The parent side of the app I overall find as being very user friendly and enjoy being able to simply send a quick message to the teachers as opposed to searching down specific emails. Great job with that : ) I also like the customizable notifications as well. Thanks!

The app appears to allow the content provider (teachers) to include so little information in a post that it generates more questions than answers. Sometimes there is only a title with no content. Often, a message is “scheduled “ for a future date while another message, with conflicting information, precedes it. Also, messages meant for as few as one student are sent to many end users, causing students and parents to respond via other channels (email) trying to clarify if the message actually applies to them. I realize these problems are mostly due to how the user is creating the message, but the app needs some rules implemented to force correct usage. In addition, significantly deeper training is needed for message creators (teachers) on how to generate content that is clear, correct, timely and applies to all that receive it.

I don’t know if Canvas has the capability of being a great application, but I do know that San Jose unified is using the student and the parent versions of the app in a way that makes it impossible to see an easy representation of today’s work across all of the classes. There are no sorting features to sift through complete and incomplete assignments. Some teachers use one area of the app to put their assignments and other teachers use another area. Sometimes assignments that are prepped and ready to go end up not being covered by the teacher that day, but still show up in the assignments in the coming days as not turned in. It’s really hard to keep everything straight. Also, I don’t know if the parent app is supposed to be so functionally useless, but I find that it has no value whatsoever. All of that said, the district and the teachers had so little time to put distance-learning together, and it’s a miracle that we have what we have. I am grateful that my child is at least able to attend virtual classes and stay engaged with teachers and peers. The teachers are all working so hard, much harder than my student is working.