Speaker 1: Welcome back everybody. Today we're going to look at Canvas gradebook tips and tricks and I'm going to be covering a lot of stuff that you can see over here on the side or you can just refer to the navigation bar at the bottom of this video and skip around to those points that you're most interested in. There are a lot of gems here in the gradebook and so let's get going and learn how to be more productive when you're grading these assessments. So the first thing that perhaps nobody ever told you is that there's an order to all of these columns but you can customize the order simply by dragging on one of these columns and you can place it somewhere else. So you can drag it and drop it onto a different place in the gradebook. You're not set to just whatever is there by default. Likewise sometimes you have the list of students and I have six dummy students here and a test student and you are you want to know what is their final grade and so you have to scroll all the way to the end of the gradebook, which here in this example isn't very far, but for some of the classes you have columns and columns of assignments, and so it can be a little onerous to scroll all the way to the end. But if you click on the kebab icon on the total here, then you can move that to the front, and that's going to place it right at the front, just behind the student name. And if I wanted to throw that to the back again, then I can move that to the end. Now again, if I click on that kebab icon on the totals, then I have the ability to sort it. So I can sort by the lowest grades to the highest grades, or the highest to the lowest, and I can also display the grade as points instead of as a percentage. And this affects the student gradebook, so it gives you this message, and then if I click Continue, then I can see the total amount of points that the students have, which in this dummy course isn't very much. And then if I want to switch that back, then I can display it as a percentage again. Now suppose you want, instead of a percentage or points, you want a letter grade to display in the totals column there. You actually have that option, but you have to get out of the gradebook. I'm going to go down to the settings for the course, and then you scroll down about halfway through the page, and there's a setting called grading scheme. So you can enable that, and then you can set a grading scheme, and this would probably be determined by your program. And by default they have a grading scheme right here, but you can go ahead and edit that if you want. So I'm going to edit this. At my institution where I teach, then we don't give out D's and we don't even have the C minuses or C's and so I would say a C plus and we call that C and that's anything from below 80 percent to 70 percent and you'll notice it goes from top down it goes from 100 percent obviously would be an A and then up until 94 percent that would also be an A anything below 94 percent you can see right here would be an A minus so 93.99 percent that that would be an A minus until 90%. And you can see it kind of moving around here. That's because you're able to insert in between the columns as well. It does get kind of a little annoying, but you can see those grading schemes. And so where I teach, we have the A, A minus, the Bs, and then a C. C means that you actually get on probation. You have to retake the course. And then F, it would be failing out. And so I could determine that anything below a 70% means you failed the course. but we usually intervene before they get to that point. So I can go ahead and save that and click Done. And now I have a grading scheme. So when I hop back over to the grade book, now we don't have very much input here. I think I have one assignment graded. And so it looks like everybody either has an A or an F in this dummy class. They're either sailing by with 100% or they have 0% completed. But the breakdown of this is just determined by whatever gradients that I set up in Canvas. All right, so let's hop back over here and we have the student names right here, and you can actually sort those by alphabetical order, which they're by default sorted from A to Z. You can also sort them from Z to A if you want. You can display it by their first name and then their last name, or the other way around. And I usually don't tinker with that stuff, but an interesting feature is also you have the secondary info. And for me, SIS, Login ID, that doesn't really mean much to me, but sometimes I place my students into groups, and so it's actually kind of useful for me to see the student, what group or groups is this student a part of. And these columns, you can see that the column isn't wide enough, but you can go ahead and stretch that. You can make any of these columns as wide or as narrow as you want. And so you can see a lot of these get cut off. And so it just depends if you want all of the titles there. The disadvantage is that some of these columns become very wide, and then you have to scroll for a larger portion of the screen. My monitor is 27 inches, so it's not small, but it's definitely not one of those fancy widescreen monitors, and so real estate is limited. And I do have this bumped up to 150%, which I usually don't, but just for demonstration purposes. Let's scroll to the end once more, and you can see before the total, I have what is called assignment groups, and so my groups are assignments, discussions, and capstones. And you can determine these not in the gradebook, but when you go to the assignments page, then you can see all of my groups right here. So I have my assignments and discussions and then the capstone. Sometimes you might have assignment groups that don't even have content because the course got copied over from last year or from last term, or you happen to be moving things around and so there's nothing in there. And those actually appear in the grade book. And so if that bothers you, then you can just delete assignment groups just by clicking on the kebab icon, those three dots, and then click delete. You can also move assignments from one group to the other. you can either click on the kebab icon and you can move it and then determine what group that you want that to be in, or you can click on the item and you can drag it and drop it to a different place in the group. And here you can even drag it and drop it within the group if you want. One last thing I'll show you before we leave this page that's interesting is if I click on the kebab icon in the assignments page, the big icon here, then you can assign group weights. And so that way the final grade isn't determined solely on the point value at face value, but by the weight of the assignment groups. And so I can say that the assignments are worth 30% of the grade, the discussions are worth 20% of the grade, this capstone is gonna be worth 50% of the grade. And you want those, ideally, to total up to 100%. If I were to say that capstone's worth 49% of the grade, then I can see that, well, there's 1% not accounted for, so I'd want to increase one of those and so that it totals 100. And then I can save that. Now let's hop over to the gradebook again and see how that change affected what the grade book looks like. So here I can see my assignment groups and I can see that assignments are worth 30% of the grade. Capstones are worth 50%. So if they just nail those discussions but they're not doing so hot on the capstone, then the capstone is weighted more and so they might want to focus some more attention on the capstone deliverables. Let's take a look at one of these assignments, this one right here, where there's some mixed feedback. Some of the students got 10 points and some of them didn't. and you want to message those two students who didn't do so well. You can click on the kebab icon for that column, for that assignment, and you can message the students who, and determine the criteria, who haven't submitted. All of my students submitted, I think, who haven't been graded. If you want to send a note out and say, hey, I'm still, you know, I still have it scheduled, it's coming, or who scored less than or more than a certain amount. So let's message all the students who scored less than 10 points, and that would be student three and student six. And then there's the subject. I can change that if I want, but you scored less than 10 points on this one assignment here. And then I can put in my message, and that's going to send this message to those two students individually. So that's not like a group chat or anything, but it's one way that you can have a message and it can go out to various students all at the same time. And you can do that right from the grade book. You don't even have to open up an email to do that. Let's look at some more options for the grade book. I'm gonna go to View and we're gonna look at Arrange By. So there are all kinds of different orders that you can arrange those columns. I tend to go with oldest to newest. So the first assignment that's due will be on the far left of the screen. And then the capstone or reflection paper, whatever's due at the end of the term will be clear off to the right. And you can do that the other way around if you want as well. Or you can sort by the lowest to highest points or highest to lowest or go by module. I think module first to last also makes sense, but mostly I just go by due date. Now the filters are also pretty great. Right now I have all three of the filters turned on. If I turn this off, then you can see that it toggles up here. And so if I go over here again and click on assignment groups you can see that appear right there. And that way you can really hone down on very specific parts of the grade book. For example, if I wanted to look at Team Alpha, then it's going to eliminate the other students who aren't part of Team Alpha. just going to showcase those students, which is student 1, 4, and 5. And I can look at a particular module, so maybe I want to look at tutorials and even assignment groups, like discussions or a capstone project. And so it's a great way for me to really streamline so that I can give feedback for a very particular thing. And especially if you have a very comprehensive gradebook, then there might be a lot to sort through. And so this is a very easy way that you can really determine what you want. I'm going to reset those filters and I can also search by the student names for example if I want to target student 4 and maybe 6 then I can look at those students and I can look at a particular assignment maybe the reflection journal 4.3 for those particular students. So again a great way that you can really streamline your focus and you'll notice here I have students 1 through 6 and then I have this test student and that's because I went through and I viewed my course in the student view and I was clicking around on things and then it creates this test student, but the student's not really part of the class and it's just taking up some space. So if that bothers you for any reason, how you get rid of that is you're going to go to the course settings and then you're going to hop over to the sections tab and you want to look at your course sections. I'm going to click on how to canvas. I have eight enrollees and there should only be six students plus me as the teacher and here's that test student. So all I'm going to do is delete the test student. Make sure you don't remove a real student because they won't appreciate that, but this test student, I'm going to go ahead and delete that. It's going to delete it permanently, it's fine. When you hop back over to the gradebook, then you can see that the test student is gone. So if that bothers you, then that's how you get rid of the test student. Now you notice partway down, there's this assignment that's unpublished, and there's various reasons why you might have an unpublished assignment appearing in your gradebook. Sometimes the course gets copied from a previous term or previous year and there's just all kinds of assignments that you need to be deleted and so you can go in and delete those but also in the gradebook you can hide those use the view and then you can see the columns just uncheck unpublished assignments if that's checked and that'll hide that for you and you'll notice another option if i click view then there's a notes column if i click on that that's actually pretty convenient it puts a column called notes right behind each of these students and then I can click on this and I can say like this student likes turtles and chocolate and that way you can have that as a reference. Now when I teach I actually have my students complete a digital scrapbook, a Padlet, and I have them share that with the other students in the class and they post pictures and talk about themselves and so I like to refer to that especially as I'm getting to know the students but then I can refer back to it and it's like oh yeah that's the student who likes Jeeps and they like to take their Jeeps camping. So for me, that's the tool that I use, but just know that in the grade book, you have this tool as well that you can write notes and especially at the beginning of the course that you can really distinguish your students and get to know them. So let's talk about late policies now. If you click on the settings button at the top right corner, you have late policies. So you can automatically apply a grade for missing submissions. If I check that, for example, I honestly can't think of a situation where I would actually give students credit for not turning in an assignment. And so maybe I'm just draconian, but I mark that as zero. If I have that toggled, then I put that as zero. If you didn't complete it, then you're going to not get credit for that assignment. Otherwise, you can apply late deductions as well, which is actually the policy that I espouse. I check this, and then what I do is 10% deduction for every day that they turn in an assignment late. And the lowest possible grade, I think, would be a zero. And then I can apply that setting. And then whatever grade that students get for an assignment, it'll automatically deduct that. Let me just make an adjustment right here. So let's take a look at this assignment here. Reflections are on 4.3. I noticed that one of these groups turned in the assignment late. And so I'm going to click on this box to expand it. And they turned it in 2.6 days late. It's a 10-point assignment. And let's suppose they met all the criteria in the rubric, so they get 10 points. But you'll notice that they got a three-point deduction because it was 2.6 days late. And I can manually change that. Suppose they were only two days late. And then that automatically takes off two points. And so I grade just straight out of the gradebook. And then Canvas converts that and recognizes that that student gets a deduction. I don't have to calculate that in my head or on my abacus or anything. And since I'm on this view, an interesting thing is normally I do the grading in SpeedGrader. And I'm going to suggest that you grade in SpeedGrader. And I use the gradebook more as a table to get a sense of how the students are doing, either assignment by assignment or how one student is doing across the term. So it's more of a snapshot for me, but the actual feedback I give in SpeedGrader. But for right now, since we're in the gradebook today, let's look at the fact that I can highlight this cell right here, and then I can click back and forth for students. So I can go from student 3 to student 4 to student 5. It's all in the same column right here. And then from student 6, I can actually go to a different assignment and so I can be moving around this way. And then from this student I can go to a different student and so it's one way that I can just navigate cell-by-cell throughout the table. Now the last thing that I will show you, let's go back to the settings and let's look at this grade posting policy. So there's two different policies here. One is automatically posting grades and the other is manually posting grades. Manually posting grades is great if you don't want some students to get their feedback before other students. For example, if you know that I have 10 papers to grade and I can do 5 tonight and then I can do 5 tomorrow night, and maybe it wouldn't be fair for 5 students to get feedback tonight and the other 5 students have to wait until tomorrow. And so in that case, I can manually post the grades, and so after I'm done grading and giving feedback, then it's not going to share it with the students until I manually do so. As opposed to automatically, as soon as I give them the feedback, assign the grade, and move on to next student, then that information will go to the student. It'll fill out their grade book, it'll send them a message. And so I typically just have automatically posting grades, that's what I do. But if there's a particular assignment, maybe this is a high stakes written assignment, and you want to turn on manually posting just for this assignment. Now, this used to be called muting the assignment. If you're a longtime Canvas user, then you might be familiar with that term. But essentially, I can go in here. And just for this assignment, I can visit this grading posting policy and I can turn this assignment to manually so all the grades are going to be hidden by default and I can grade all of them and I can take three days to grade them and then when I'm done with all of the student grades I can go in and post the grades manually and then all the students will get their grades at the same time. So the last tip, this is kind of a bonus tip that I'll share with you, is if you click on this keyboard at the very top of the screen here you can have keyboard shortcuts and so I highly suggest that you actually learn these shortcuts. It'll really help you expedite your process, and the less time that you can take grading papers and grading assessments, then the more time you can dedicate to actually teaching your students. And so look for any shortcut that will help you be more efficient as a teacher. If I missed any obvious tip or trick in the Canvas gradebook, then let me know in the comments what your favorite thing to do is in the gradebook. What are the things that help you be more efficient and productive as you're grading papers? Also something that's really going to help you be a lot more efficient in Canvas is right here on YouTube. If you go and click that subscribe button, there's all kinds of tips and tricks associated with that. You're going to learn all kinds of things about Canvas, how to do awesome stuff in your Canvas pages, learn some nuts and bolts and tips and tricks. My goal is to really help people level up their Canvas abilities. Let's learn the basics, but then let's get beyond the basics and really make an exceptional experience for your students. So click that subscribe button and click the bell for notifications every Tuesday 9am Eastern Time. I've got new content coming your way. And also you'll want to check out the website howtocanvas.com. Here I have my blog posts, my pictures and screenshots, anything I can do to help you be a better teacher in Canvas. So thanks for being with me, and until next time, happy teaching and learning. you