Navigation: MCC's Canvas Classrooms Student Guide

This video is another in the series of Student Guides for Mesa Community College's Canvas Classrooms. This time, we're going to talk about navigation inside Canvas.

When you log on to Canvas, the first thing you see is your Canvas dashboard. On the left side is a report on Recent Activity in all of your courses--Kind of like the newsfeed you see in Facebook or other social networking sites.

Everything will be in chronological order with the most recent at the top. Your Recent Activity reports will contain active links, so you can go directly to anything listed.

On the right side are three task menus: To Do, Coming Up, and Recent Feedback. The To Do menu lists assignments and tasks that need to be done right away. The Coming Up menu looks ahead a week or so, and the Recent Feedback menu lists assignments that have been recently graded.

At the top of the dashboard are the global menus, and we call them global because they are always visible while you are in Canvas. Courses and Groups lists all your courses and groups.

Assignments duplicates the information in the task menus but when you're inside a course, you can see this list without having to go back to the dashboard.

Grades shows you a quick snapshot of how you're doing in each of your classes.

Calendar shows you all the due dates for all your Canvas classes at one time. You can also enter your own appointments and deadlines, and each entry is color coded, and you can uncheck certain classes to look only at the dates for that one class. Click on any assignment listed within your calendar to go directly to the instructions for that assignment.

In the upper right corner of the screen, the Inbox link takes you to Canvas Conversations, the place where you send and receive messages within the Canvas system. The number after the inbox shows how many new messages have arrived since the last time you logged in.

In the Canvas Guide on Notifications, we show you how to set up Canvas to send copies
of your messages to your personal email outside of Canvas or to your Facebook account or other places.

Finally, Profile opens the page where you edit your personal information. Here, you should upload your picture or your avatar so it will show up with your Canvas Conversations and discussion posts and wherever else your name appears in Canvas.

Now, let's take a look inside a specific course. The buttons you see on the left all work just within the course. If you click on Grades here, you see only your grades for this class. If you click on Assignments, you see only the assignments for this specific
class. But if you click on the global Assignments button at the top of the page, you see the assignments for all of your classes at once.

Global menus are at the top of the page. Course-specific links are at the left side
of the page.

And notice the navigation or bread crumb trail just under the global menus. It'll show you where you're located in what course and which tool or specific activity you're on at the moment.

To back, click on the previous item in the bread crumb trail. Or, click on the course name to return to the course homepage. Or click on the house or the Canvas logo to
go back to the dashboard.

Now you know how to navigate Canvas!

Please have a look at the other Student Guides in this series.

This has been a presentation of the Mesa Community College.

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[joanna scheffler]

I like the video and the narrator's voice, but the background music is distracting. I was already familiar with the material, but I think this would be easy for anyone to follow.