Canvas Parent - Track student progress & manage assignments

Traditionally, parents wanting to track their children's academic progress had to navigate through assignment planners, communicate via email with teachers, or wait for report cards. However, that wait has come to an end! Canvas Parent is specifically created to give parents a quick overview of their child's educational journey. 

With Canvas Parent, parents can:

• Access descriptions and deadlines for assignments

• Set reminders for upcoming assignments

• Check grades for individual assignments

• Review overall course grades

• Establish alerts for grading updates

• Stay informed about course announcements

Please note: This mobile application is exclusively available for parents whose children are enrolled in schools that have activated Canvas Parent.

Comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

All of sudden, I wasn’t able to view my daughter’s grades starting last week for an unknown reason. It was doing just fine when the school started several weeks ago. I logged on the website to ensure it’s not an app issue. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an app issue after all. The grades are displayed and listed for me to view on the web version. I did everything I could think of. Logged out, back in. Deleted the app, reinstalled. Restarted my phone. To no avail, nothing is resolving the issue. Any suggestions, update or feedback would be greatly appreciated! By the way, my daughter’s school distract is in Las Vegas which would be CCSD - Clark County School District if you need the information to troubleshoot the issue or data communication. Thank you!