Leesville adjusts to Canvas

The 2023-2024 school year has brought many changes to the school including new rules, new teachers, a principal and also an old but newly introduced way to learn and for teachers to post their work for students.

The platform that Wake County has issued for all teachers to use in canvas.

Canvas is almost like Google Classroom but Canvas “offers more interactive features than Google Classroom when it comes to both synchronous and asynchronous learning” – Instructure.com. 

Some teachers before Wake County issued that all classes taught from Canvas had actually already been using it.

Ashley Tabron, english teacher at LRHS, said “In the past I used Canvas and google classroom but I used Canvas first then when everyone moved to google classroom during the pandemic I used it but then I switched back last year.

“I used it like 2016 to 2017 so a long time ago, and then came back to Google Classroom but now back to canvas,” Said Tabron.

For students in middle school most of them used google classroom and have had to make the adjustment to Canvas this year making it harder for them to keep track of work 

Abbey Hymiller, senior, wrote, “In middle school I used google classroom & personally I think it’s unorganized, messy, and also much harder to navigate than google classroom was.

Another pro for all of Wake County is that by switching their learning off of canvas is that it appears to look and feel more like a college style way of learning which teaches kids how to be more responsible and keep track of their assignments well before going into highschool.

Also canvas is said to make it easier for teachers to be able to monitor and also keep track of their students individually which makes most teachers like and prefer to use canvas. The downside of canvas compared to google classroom is that it is slightly more difficult and confusing to find certain assignments for students.

“I like Canvas, I think it has a lot of features that helps teachers like you can group students and like only give them information, you can like do quizzes, you can reset stuff, you can organize things really well, you can copy it to other classes and it just gives you a lot of data.

“Like I can see who logged in, how long they’ve logged in and all kinds of stuff they really need. It also feels more personalized to each student,”said Tabron.

Wake county also mandated that clubs for school be managed by canvas as well causing a few blocks and problems within being able to reach out to the members.

“Canvas is very inconvenient to use for clubs and keeping that information organized, with key club it was so complicated to figure out because we had to have people join it and also try and figure out how the other officers and I can post things on canvas alongside the teachers,”said Hymiller.

Some students and teachers have mixed feelings about making this switch since a number of students have been using Google Classroom through the past years of being in school. 

“I definitely think canvas makes it harder to manage my work because finding all of your assignments for different classes can be difficult since different teachers post assignments in different ways, like for example some teachers post them as announcements and some post them under modules,”said Hymiller.

“I think students some of them don’t really care, some of them are really confused and frustrated but I try my best on my end to organize everything so it’s easy to navigate and get to and then there’s like a student view so often if i’m sharing my screen i’ll show them what theirs should look like so they can follow along so I just try and organize it as much as possible,”said Tabron.