Canvas Parent Hack 3.8.0 + Redeem Codes

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.

The concept of this app is great. I’m relatively tech savvy, but find the execution frustrating. In my case, when I want to quickly scan over grades for my 3 kids, I have to weed through years of past courses on the list that appear in alphabetical order. Not all classes, but enough to make it a bit confusing. I don’t need to see or sort through 6th grade classes for my freshman. There isn’t an obvious way to remove the courses I don’t need to see anymore. I would appreciate more control to customize the information I want to see.

There also isn’t a way to mass clear notification alerts. In my opinion, a red notification icon listing a count totaling hundreds of unread messages with no way to quickly clear them, is irritating. Early message settings that sent an notification every time a teacher created an assignment, etc, racks up way more notifications than anyone would want or can reasonably handle. Multiply that across 3 kids and all their classes and it quickly gets overwhelming.

Giving users more control in the app would be greatly appreciated.

Canvas is good in which it allows the parents to be linked to view the child’s assignments and performance in class to communicate with teachers for better understanding. However, the bad part about it is that the teachers, students, and parents all have different view from the same portal. On the parent’s view, I’ll see missing, late, or non-submitted work. Then, I ask my child about it and he/she will check and show me that it is turned in and gets frustrated with me because any time I don’t see work submitted on my view that is due, I’ll ask again because I don’t see or remember that he/she told me it was submitted another few days or week later as it’s still showing the same status. I’ll check with the teacher and the teacher will say that he/she does not see it submitted or that it’s not graded yet because it’s turned in late so grade average will still show low, or they’ll comment on the child’s work that we’re not able to see on our view. Teachers are busy. So, they get frustrated when they see many emails from parents.

I like being able to see the percent of completed work, things that are missing and no longer available to work on, etc..
However, I feel this is a very generic form to keep parents connected. Our teachers are doing a fantastic job connecting via remind but Canvas could be improved for more clarity.

I would really like to be able to see what was turned in. For instance, if they were in person he’d bring home his completed, graded work with notes from the teacher. I would have a better idea of what he should work on.
It would also be helpful to have a description of what’s expected.

Nothing is formatted properly - in fact even writing this review is the screen populated by the Canvas app shows my text in white on a white background - so incredibly not helpful. This app is absolutely the worst, in my inbox it shows all of my outgoing messages - there is no way to filter them out. It doesn’t show the alerts from teachers in one central location on the app so I have to open each class page to check when things are posted. Never mind the fact that when you open files on canvas they aren’t formatted to print properly, and you must download them, then reopen them in another program and reformat them so they are printable - in no way is this convenient! Even something as simple as viewing a file as a pdf is made impossible in Canvas - as you are forced to move the document around in a dead space to view the entire image at once. Schools fell for this shinned up garbage app, and we are all the victim. The complaints from teachers and other parents about Canvas are many.

Sometimes I get logged out and it takes days for me to get logged back in. I finally figured out. I had to reset password, not from Safari but Chrome, to get back in. When I finally log back in, I get sent to the app that took me days to get back to. Also, I have no clue why my password does not work in the first place. This has happened three times and none of the admins on my district's end knows why. Second, I have to go in and out of each, if my children's classes just to see only grades from second semester. My children couldn't see assignments due that I saw, putting them behind. I'm on it this thing daily because the app is so poor in quality.
I read a few other reviews and it mentioned -how some students are using a different area from teachers and teachers are using a completely different area from students. It doesn't surprise me.
I hope our district chooses another app soon, because the issues continue.

I am a teacher and have experience with Canvas and the Canvas apps from all three perspectives: teacher, parent, and student. The parent app is completely useless. I wish I could give zero or negative stars. It’s nothing more than a list of assignments. You can’t see the grades of individual assignments, or the submissions themselves to see what your student got right and wrong. There is no way to message the teachers (which would be the main reason for parents to use the app, in my opinion). I ended up having my child log in on the student app and view her progress exclusively from the student point of view. Clearly the developers of the parent app have never been parents involved in their children’s education. There are also known bugs regarding missing assignments that the Canvas developers in the forums have outright stated are not being fixed because the parent app is their lowest priority.

Canvas is awful! It has caused so much stress in our household. My son had to retype his assignment 3 times because it randomly disappeared and didn’t save when he went to click the submit button. Frustrating beyond words to a child with dyslexia, who is already working 3x as had as the average student just to keep up. Assignments say that they are submitted only to find out the next day that the teacher didn’t receive them so now they are late. You can’t just type in the assignment box, you have to jump through 45 hoops of copy and pasting in google docs to get a document to submit. Our teachers aren’t trained properly on it either which only adds to the mayhem and frustration . There is not training for parents to help their children navigate through this mess either, My apologies but needless to say we are not fans.