{"id":3650,"date":"2017-04-18T14:27:49","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T22:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=3650"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:22:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:22:13","slug":"canvas-and-the-impossible-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2017\/04\/canvas-and-the-impossible-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"Canvas and the Impossible Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Canvas, of course, does not have x<\/em>.\u00a0 <\/span>In this case, x<\/em> is a blog or journaling or portfolio function.<\/p>\n

Yes, I know you can LTI this, but those never work like they\u2019re supposed to.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Now, if Canvas had real threads, I could use a threaded discussion, with each student controlling their own topic. But Canvas doesn’t have this x<\/em> either. To do everyone\u2019s journaling on one discussion\u00a0would thus mean scrolling for days and days\u2026<\/p>\n

So, instead, I tried creating a forum for each student<\/em>, to act as their own space (it\u2019s for an Honors class, so 25 students – not too bad). Then I realized to grade them in Speed(!)Grader would mean opening them one at a time. Every week or so. Ugh.<\/p>\n

Second attempt. Create one big forum and but have groups<\/em>. Put one student per group, and have all the other students peer grade. That way, each student can post on their own, but everyone can still see the posts and comment.<\/p>\n

The wonderful Laura Paciorek<\/a> helped me test it. We became students. Posting to our own forums as our own group went fine. But when we tried to peer grade, we got \u201cunauthorized\u201d warnings when we clicked on anything to see it. And after this humiliation, we were returned to the \u201cgroup\u201d site, which had its own Home (and everything else) links on the menu — students would be completely lost and unable to get back to the main course page.<\/p>\n

I considered peer grading as assignments<\/em>, but assignments are one-shot deals – you can\u2019t keep going back and adding more, making a portfolio.<\/p>\n

I considered each student having their own Page<\/em>, but you can\u2019t grade Pages, and it\u2019s incredibly easy to wipe out everything on a Page accidentally (been there, done that).<\/p>\n

So reluctantly, I checked out Google (OK Google, fix Canvas). Canvas is supposed to be Google-friendly:\u00a0the Canvas\u2019 \u201cCollaborate\u201d function is a Google Doc, intended to be a single Doc that all students can edit. But I\u2019ve done my research and I know that multiple students working on the same Doc can easily erase each others\u2019 work, because Canvas isn\u2019t Google and can\u2019t actually enable multiple editors at once. Great idea – get a bunch of people already tentative about collaborative editing to engage that little problem!<\/p>\n

The Collaboration difficulty was confirmed by the post that gave me my final idea<\/a> (so far), from Chris Long over at the K-12 Canvas forum: use Google Docs as URL assignments<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So the plan is:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n