Canvas Parent Reviews

by Parent LMS Reviewer

Especially considering the fact the desktop version is missing crucial functionalities, such as sorting and filtering. Or search functions. Or reliant submit buttons. I could go on. I was hoping CanvasParent would complement the deficient desktop, but while it allows you to be notified of overdue assignments across various classes (so you don’t have to go into each individual module), it doesn’t remove missing assignments once they are submitted. Learning from home during an epidemic is hard enough for families. The fact that a for-profit company fails to provide the most basic of functionalities when other companies offer better solutions for FREE is way below expectations! Do these guys even test their UX/UI?

by Pzamz

This must be all a joke. I have no problem getting in on a PC, but with CanvasParent on my phone, not possible. It’s says my user ID does not exist, so when i go to recreate the account it says it’s already being used. And round and round I go. When I go back to the PC, no problem. So I look for Tech support while there since it doesn’t exist on CanvasParent . Well it doesn’t exist period! It tells you to click the help link at the bottom of the page if you’re having problems, no such link. There is no where to get help. Everything links to these community blogs just like SalesForce. What a joke. I some how found a phone number and the woman said she couldn’t help, that I would have to contact the school district. What? The school district can’t help themselves and they are going to figure this out?

by Kdml

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. CanvasParent 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 CanvasParent 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.

by TheNicSB

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 CanvasParent 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 CanvasParent 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.

by Jp In Bako

CanvasParent should make it easier to track students’ progress. Instead, there’s an email notification every time time teacher grades an assignment, but no grade is shown on the email. So there’s no purpose to the dozens of emails each and every day. Once your email is set in parent canvas, there’s no way to change it to a different email (like a secondary account you don’t mind getting hundreds of emails a week on.) And even on CanvasParent itself, your student can submit an assignment but it will show as unsubmitted until it’s graded by the instructor. THIS IS USELESS! I need to know what assignments my kids need to turn in! Wholly unsatisfied with CanvasParent. Trying to figure out how to delete it & stop the email train.

by Drbarb03

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 CanvasParent , 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.

by Texas User

As of 2.1.0, this is a garbage app. If you work for a school district, please don’t use this. I didn’t think it was possible, but they’ve made it worse over the last year. Now, you can’t see individual assignment grades at all. This is a regression; it used to work.

Let that soak in. This is an app to let parents see their kids grades. Without. Grades.

Garbage app. The management should be embarrassed.

Update as of v2.0.3: Nope, you haven’t fixed all of the problems with two kids in the same class. If I’m looking at the calendar entries, I see the right grades for Kid1 and Kid2. But, if I tap the calendar entry for - grade belonging to Kid2 to get details, it shows me the grade of Kid1. Try try again, and please tell me that your software test plan will run this test and the prior tests so you don’t introduce more regressions. I’m tired of being an unpaid software tester.

Previous review:

First, my prior critical review was mysteriously deleted. That’s not a sign of a company confident in its product.

Second, CanvasParent simply doesn’t work for two kids. I have twins in the same grade, and CanvasParent only shows one kids’ grades, even with both kids entered into Canvas. Selecting kid one still shows kid two’s grades, even acted dragging down to refresh.

by Turbo386

I get emails saying that a teacher graded an assignment or left a comment. There is a hyperlink in that email to “View” these. This takes me to a Microsoft account login. I do have a Microsoft acct, but when I try to sign in I get an error message saying I’m not allowed to view this. So, I jump on canvas app. There is NOWHERE where I can view comments, or even see grades. The entire app and system is beyond confusing. Im sure the teachers are struggling with it as well, but there is no way for me to view assignments that my student needs to complete, or has completed, or see a comment a teacher leaves. I’m sure the teachers do NOT have time to answer tons of emails in their inbox when this system is supposed to be that for them. Just horrible.

by Debusf

CanvasParent is useless. all teachers use it differently. There is no consistency. What a parent sees from their app does not match the students. The student could be submitting their work but depending on how each teacher uses CanvasParent depends on what a parent is seeing and if it is even accurate. There needs to be a more common practice for every teacher using this without so many options. Make it more simple and streamlined so as a parent we can see what our children have or have not completed and what the teacher is assigning. I have two kids in different grades with different teachers and each one is using this system differently. I think canvas has failed our teachers, students and parents with CanvasParent. It appears that whomever created it actually never utilized it or realized how teachers may or may not use it.

by Heavenly68

If I could give CanvasParent negative stars I would. What kind of app is built where the kids can see their grades but the parents can’t. Not very smart in my book at least I can see what the grades were in progress book and I don’t know if they’ve turned in assignments or have a turn in assignments you show things are red but there’s nothing to look at. If there’s a more messed up way that we could do this I don’t know of it this is by far one of the worst things that I’ve ever seen an education system do. Thanks for making my job as a parent harder because now I have no clue if they’re doing better or worse only when I see their final grades for the quarter or semester do I know they didn’t do good but I couldn’t tell because Canvas is not friendly. Nor is it helpful. Please a band in CanvasParent or get better at it.

by Ericf83

The concept of CanvasParent 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 CanvasParent would be greatly appreciated.

by DMullinsMusic

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 CanvasParent 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 CanvasParent 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.

by Richmanscott

I have two kids using Canvas for online school during this pandemic. This is my first exposure to Canvas. It took a little getting used to but really liked the calendar which was more like an agenda. At a glance I could see what had been submitted, what was missing or late, and what was coming due. Yesterday CanvasParent was updated while I was viewing the calendar. The one “update” was a redesigned calendar. This new calendar is OK at best if you are the student focusing on a single day’s work but practically useless for parents used to the ability of a bird’s eye view of assignments and their status. I’d rate CanvasParent 4 or 5 stars if with this “redesigned calendar” offered the option of switching views. As it stands, CanvasParent is now useless to parents.

by Parentvu

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.

by OpktoOrlMom

I’ve had the Canvas Parent app and have been using it successfully for years. I really appreciated the calendar view that would let me see my students assignments every day and also see if it had been submitted or not. With this most recent update the calendar view is now completely blank on the freestanding Canvas Parent app and I can see from the community forum that many other users are experiencing this too. It would be great if we were notified of a fix but so far none has been made known and that’s CanvasParent is significantly diminished.

by Johnnys Dad 3rd

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 CanvasParent 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!

by Nileema

No stars for CanvasParent.
Whoever came up with this stupid idea of having the parent request the child for a pairing id?
Let the school pair it..or let the parent pair
Teenagers won’t let parents in if they get a chance.. basic psychology.
Please change it in such a way that the student gets a notification(within app) when somebody pairs with them. If the child sees it is an impostor(as in not a parent) he can take it up with the school to remove the perpetrator (and possibly set the police after the impostor😊)

by ATC8272

Canvas bags s great for keeping up with homework and my kids’ grades; however, there is an annoying problem I wish you would fix. I have twins who take the same classes. When I look at their graded assignments through the link sent by the teacher, I have no idea whose grades I am looking at. I would like to see the student’s name somewhere. Also, when you are in the screen viewing the weekly assignments and back out of it, it doesn’t go back to the same student’s page. It goes back to the first student in my kids drop down list. Since I have 4 kids, it’s really annoying!

by Kyesmama

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.

by A-Little-Help-Please?

CanvasParent 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 CanvasParent 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.

by 3lassiesmama

CanvasParent is full of bugs and errors. I have absolutely no idea why our school district selected this LMS platform. It isn't user friendly for teachers or parents. Assignments are sometimes listed as missing, but aren't because obviously teacher weren't consulted in the design process...instructure, there is a lag time between a due date and the grade being assigned. It would be nice to see a list of assignments under each course rather than searching through the calendar for the assignment. And the assignments shouldn't disappear.

by A0emouse

The mobile apps are the worst. The parent app is completely useless. You can’t see grades. You can’t message the teacher. And it’s very hard to read in the mobile app (the menu takes up 3/4 of the screen and you can barely see anything else).
The student app does not work half the time. Teachers are telling students to use the desktop version because half their submittals don’t work from the mobile apps. Hello?!? Please bring your technology into the 2000s. Everything is mobile these days.

by Frustrated III

I created a parent account, which required inputting a name, an email address, and a password. However, after logging out and trying to login it asks for a login name. I tried using my name and password, which does not work, then tried my email address and password, which also did not work. When I created the account, it did not ask for a login name. Can’t log back in and can’t create a new account since my email is already being used on Canvas. App is useless for me. I need to contact the teacher. Hopefully I can get an email address somewhere. So far this has been a big waste of my time.

by Dholmes76

Everyone associated with CanvasParent should be fired and banned from coding for eternity. It's really that bad. There is absolutely nothing useful about CanvasParent. Based upon the functionality currently offered in CanvasParent, we are years away from having something almost useful. The UI is horrible. There is no separation between my two kids' info. No grades displayed. No assignment details. The grade I give Canvas is an F.

The fact that my tax dollars are going to support this worthless application makes me want to fire the entire school board.

Update: latest release is just as worthless as all the previous versions. There really is no hope for this software package and App.

by Mk Artist

4.0 star review, must be all fake.

Student’s grade automatically decreases and marked as missing once it’s past the due date because the teacher has not finish inputting the grades in. My kid gets stressed when we question about the work and every single time, it’s because they teacher didn’t finish inputting the grades. This is causing some serious tension because of your stupid app. Get it fixed.

The so called attachment syllabus can’t be viewed properly, because it seems to be a pdf file. Not sure if it’s a training issue with the school setup, but I have no way to do a simple click to contact a teacher for a given subject. No click or email information to be found within CanvasParent .

by Dadblog

I was looking at my daughter canvas on CanvasParent for my iPhone. There is not the same information available as when I connect through the email links sent from teachers. So to gather the proper amount of info needed I need to connect through the link making CanvasParent useless space on my phone, which also has “locked out” parent inaccessibility. While I was on CanvasParent I got automatically logged off; Didn’t touch or do anything, just observing a page. When I try to log back on I can no longer find my school. Been working on it for 3 days. Just figured I’d pass the info on. I should have full access to canvas with the exception of posting or responses to teachers.

by Spillane Mom 4

I downloaded CanvasParent when my son finished orientation week for H.S. We were able to pair easily and I thought we were rolling along.....until I checked the online version. We had missed an important message from his team and other important info. CanvasParent showed absolutely nothing. Blank. I’m waiting to see if things change once school begins in earnest, but if CanvasParent is just taking up space on my phone I will delete and use the online version.

by Steven Newby

I like the idea of monitoring progress in Canvas but it would be great if:
✔️if it showed me my kid’s grade per assignment EVERY time and not just occasionally.
✔️If CanvasParent allowed me to communicate with the teachers
✔️If I could easily tell the difference between a whole class being behind schedule starting an assignment vs. it’s my own kid who missed an assignment
✔️if it clearly illustrated which assignments could be corrected and which are closed

by Force Ten

Since the last update a few days ago, when I click on one of the courses for my child, the “Done” button in the upper right corner doesn’t always appear so that I can go back to the main screen where all courses are listed. This causes me to have to completely close CanvasParent and reopen it to do anything more. Please fix!!!

by MariahMZ

For some reason I can not view anything in one of his classes. Accelerated math shows No assignments on any days, which is the class with the most assignments, yet all the other classes’ show up. There’s something else about it that’s not very user friendly, but it asked me to take the survey before I got on CanvasParent , so I don’t recall.
It would be nice if it were more capabilities.