Canvas Teacher Reviews

CanvasTeacher paired with book widgets allows me to grade French and Spanish worksheets so much faster and have self checking assignments for distance learning. We have it set to sync to infinite campus so s lot of data entry is accurately and reliably done for you. This is the first time in years and years that part of my workload was LESSENED! Such a time saver. It is so much easier to track kids’ work patterns. I spend time helping, not repeatedly grading the same answers on fill in the blank activities. I wish the Quiz portion of CanvasTeacher were more flexible. That part needs improvement to aide in engagement and making the kinds of paper and digital quizzes I make. It is far behind on that front but thankfully allows other software access. Zero regrets. I highly recommend CanvasTeacher to my students. It is very user friendly for distance learners.

I use CanvasTeacher and generally like it. Performance has been pretty stable with a few times where upgrades screwed up the works briefly, but contact with Canvas straightened things out pretty soon. There is one thing CanvasTeacher does, though, that drives me bananas. They wanted it to be a “speedgrader”, so they’ve made it so that the slightest flick allows you to quickly and effortlessly move from one student to another. I don’t know about others, but this feature seriously screws me from time to time. I believe it’s important to give the students substantial feedback on their work. So I will write a rather long comment - but midway through find I need to scroll to another part of the student’s submission to finish making my point. It’s at that point that, if I don’t really carefully just scroll straight down or up, but accidentally scroll slightly right or left, that CanvasTeacher moves me to another student, and my long comment is lost. I have to go back and rewrite it. I can’t tell you how many times that has happened and it just doubles my work every time. I really would rather it take a little more effort to get from one student to another if it would mean I’m not having to rewrite my comments so often. Thanks for considering that tweak, Canvas!

Overall, this is a solid app. However, it seems the developers did not take into account that we use CanvasTeacher to check-in on our courses while we’re on the go. We do not use it to facilitate our courses. Accessing your course through a mobile browser may be a better option depending upon what you’re trying to do.

- There is no ability to mark a message or discussion post as unread in CanvasTeacher . Once you open or view it, it cannot be marked as unread. If I don’t plan on responding at that very moment, I have to make a separate reminder to check it when I return to the desktop. I’ve basically stopped accessing messages and discussions through CanvasTeacher for this very reason. (In most cases, I’m not going to respond as soon as a student messages me, but I do want to read their message. Marking it as unread allows me to see the notification on the desktop where I prefer to respond.)
- The actual text from sent and received messages cannot be copied. Not being able to copy a portion of a previous message I have sent is frustrating. I frequently send the same explanations for assignments, etc. Having the ability to copy a portion of a message for another email - when I’m on the go - seems like an oversight on the developers’ behalf.
- To be continued...

My course is structured around many team project submissions. When I select an assignment for grading, as I expect, I see a graphic with the number of submissions graded, the number in need of grading, and the number not submitted. When I select the middle option, need grading, I get a list of the submissions. When I select team one, I get a Forrest Gump box of chocolates experience—a team submission appears, just not the one I selected. So I select done, and try another submission. Same issue, the same team submission reappears—again, not the one I selected. So I give in and grade the random submission. I click done, and note it is off the needs grading list. I select another submission and get the same submission I just graded, only this time without a grade. Darn. I click done and then back to the assignment submission summary. I note that one assignment is showing up as graded. I click on it, confirm it is the random submission I graded previously. I open it and confirm it has a grade. Click done, go back to summary, click on needs grading, select a submission, and now I either get a new random submission to grade OR the original random submission reappears—without a grade... this is not acceptable. The system worked fine 2 weeks ago and is now squirrelly. The iPad makes marking up reports so easy, but this is defeated if I can’t access the submission I want to grade!

I use the Canvas app exclusively for Speedgrader since everything else is easier to do by computer. I noticed that it was often failing to save the last annotations or erasures I made on papers. This would be an understandable bug, especially given the sudden demands of the pandemic, but six months after my initial report it still hasn’t been fixed. Much worse is the constant gaslighting along the way by Instructure support: for example, they said they had never heard of the problem and tried to claim it was the fault of my network connection when six different members of my department (everyone who has used it, on many different networks including our very fast one on campus — as well as other reviewers here) see the same problem. They claimed it was a problem with the Apple Pencil (what else would I use?) and said they couldn’t obtain one for testing. I’ve sent them samples and recorded multiple videos showing the problem but then weeks go by and once I do hear from them it’s back to square one.

Update: my campus Instructure liaison has told me this will not be fixed. Apparently data corruption is considered acceptable. Don’t make the mistake we did of getting locked into this platform — find a different LMS provider!

I wouldn’t use this alone, but it is helpful when paired with the desktop version. I like the ability to write directly on my student’s pdf assignments (it would be great if it took fewer clicks for them to find that feedback, but that is not the fault of the Teacher app). I pretty much only use this to write on students’ work as I find everything else easier on the desktop .

I’ve removed my complaint about the February 2021 update since that has been resolved. The remaining issue that I have is that sometimes when I write feedback it doesn’t save the ends of sentences/words. It’s difficult to troubleshoot because I can see everything until I close the assignment and reopen it (which I don’t usually do). Unfortunately the students can get confused by comments with partial words or missing worlds! If I don’t feel too rushed I load the next paper then come back to the previous one and skim through the comments to make sure that everything shows up, but it is frustrating. (For reference I use an iPad Pro purchased in November 2019 and an Apple Pencil)

I have been waiting for the ability to annotate student papers with my Apple Pencil for a long time. I'm so excited about that and it seems to work pretty well. I have lost, though, the ability to leave voice or media comments from my iPad. That is a feature I use with every paper I assign, so I really hope that comes back soon. I also had a hard time getting a grade to save. This particular assignment I was just marking rough drafts as complete or incomplete. I hit the + to add a grade, selected "complete" from the menu, but then had to push the + again to save it. It took me a while to figure out why nothing was saving. It seemed a little awkward. I like the direction CanvasTeacher is going, but I had to go back and reinstall the old SpeedGrader app in order to accomplish what I needed to get done. EDIT AFTER SOME MORE USE: I also realized after grading a whole batch of essays that some of my handwritten annotations are missing! There are times when only a few words of a whole sentence are there when I go back in or when students look on their end. NO!! Waste of time!!

There are so many odd quirks with this application that it makes you wonder. They apparently have developed the whole app without access to iPad and Apple Pencil - this has been born out when I’ve called support and the people that answer the phone have stated that they’ve never used an Apple Pencil and can’t understand my complaints. For example, the engineers decided on a 2.0pt stroke for the pencil when grading assignments and the default can not be changed. As you scroll through each assignment you have to select the width you want; it doesn’t even remember your selection during a session! Not that big of a deal, but annoying. (The default used to be 1.0pt, but some developer changed it without providing an option to set your own default!) This tells me that the most important users in the Canvas universe are the programmers.

Overall, CanvasTeacher works about 80% well and they have no interest in making it better. Like google, Canvas is satisfied with mediocrity. Too bad.

If you are like me, you might like to write detailed feedback notes, when grading your students’ submitted homework. Then, just like me, you are also constantly struggling with the tiny input text box, which doesn’t auto-scroll properly, making you constantly wiggle your phone this way and that in an attempt to type a few additional words. And if you wish to copy/paste a link to a helpful external reference, forget it!

A couple of months ago, I have raised this issue with a Canvas support representative. He sounded so surprised that I began to wonder if this problem affects me alone, but it is not the case. I have asked my colleagues and they too are having the same issue.

I LOVED the Canvas teacher app until the most recent update. The grading in CanvasTeacher has been very glitchy. It will say that a student submitted work, but then when I open it say they haven’t submitted anything. If I close it out and go back to it, the student’s work is there. When I slide the slider over to give a grade, the grade will repeatedly disappear.

Another thing weird about the update is now my to-do list only says how many assignment groups I have to grade, not how many total assignments I have. I saw this weekend that I only had 7 assignments on the to do list, so I thought the grading could wait until Monday. No, each of those “to-dos” included multiple submissions. I really had dozens of things to grade. I really liked knowing I had 145 or whatever submissions to grade, so when I got down to 5 I knew I had five left. Now 5 could mean 500.

Not a fan of this update, Canvas.

I like having students complete both peer and self reviews. I love the peer review assignment option through assignment pages. For the purposes of the classes I teach I would like use this function to assign students to as reviewer of their own submissions. I attempted to do this but noticed their own names are not an option when manually assignment peer reviews. Perhaps there is another way to do this that I have not figured out yet? If not, I would LOVE if such a function can be added so students can engage in a self review process with all the same editable functions that are available in the peer review option.

I would also love for all the rubric descriptions to be available in the canvas app. Right now only the general category description is available but even then, no consistently. I can see it for some of my assignments but not all. It would be nice if both General descriptions as well as the descriptions by point distribution were available.

I have young children at home and often find myself grading at all hours of the day and night based on my infant and toddlers eating and sleeping schedules. Not having access to full rubric details from my phone slows up my progress when I am trying to take advantage of these random opportunities to grade while feeding our putting my kiddos to sleep.

Otherwise I’m loving CanvasTeacher !!

I haven’t done online teaching for a good while, and I was pleasantly shocked to see how well designed CanvasTeacher was compared to what I remember about online learning platforms in the early days. Kudos to the developers. I truly was amazed. This was made for busy teachers on the go (which is me!) to be able to do good grading quickly.

One flaw: the comment window for the teacher is so tiny, and there’s plenty of space above it for it to grow! I had to resort to writing my comments in another app on my iPad Pro and then pasting them in. I’m surprised that in an app with otherwise great UI that this little flaw showed up.

One wish: I like making audio comments, but I like to pause and restart the recording multiple times—like 40 times in a 25-minute recording session. I didn’t see that I could do that with the audio recording function.

CanvasTeacher seems like it is getting the attention it deserves, but there are still some basic functions that are sorely lacking.

1) I need and want to be able to download student submissions within CanvasTeacher instead of going to the site in a browser. Because...
2) I cannot rely on the built-in annotation system. Recently, it just simply didn’t display when trying to grade and comment on a student’s paper. There was just nothing there. I could swipe to the next student’s submission and it was there... swipe back to the previous student and still nothing.
3) I really like the inbox and messaging system of CanvasTeacher. Very easy to read and use and in fact, I much prefer it to using the site for this task. BUT... I can’t select text for copy and paste??? That’s insane, guys. There are so many times where I have the need to email individual students and share similar information. Copy and paste. This should be an immediate priority. Please!
4) It makes absolutely no sense to me that pressing the “Courses” icon at the bottom of the screen does not take me back to the main course selection splash page. Zero sense. Instead, we have to hit the “Back” option in the top left twenty-five times. Why is the “Courses” button there at all if not for this quick access? It would be hugely helpful for those of us with 6+ courses any given semester.

Overall it’s good enough to do what I need to, but not everything always works correctly. For example, sometimes you cannot swipe sideways to grade the next student’s assignment, and need to press “done” to go back to the list of submissions and select the next student. You can only annotate documents where the whole document is a file submission—you cannot annotate quiz questions that are file uploads and have the students see those annotations. This is very frustrating; direct feedback can be very valuable to the students, so the system not allowing students to see these annotations is problematic. (My workaround has been do save the annotated files and email them to each student individual. This is not a sustainable solution for me; it only works this quarter because I have small classes.)

Update: I’ve run up against another issue that caused me to remove a star. When grading, sometimes grades and comments on individual questions simply don’t save. This is obviously a major issue.

- When students view my annotations on the web, they don’t look the same as on my iPad, even though when I open my old feedback on the iPad it looks the same as it ever did.

- Part of this is that even when I set feedback text to have a transparent background, it isn’t saved: I swipe to grade a different paper in the same assignment, then swipe back a second later, and all transparent-background text is switched to white-background, so all my comments block out essay text. Aside from this being a bug, **why would this even be the default?** I have submitted this as a bug to the Canvas team, but have heard little to nothing about it.

- Please implement more keyboard shortcuts. Searching a document should be available with Command-F, not exclusively by highlighting a word, tapping “search” on the popover, deleting the word, and then using that popup to search for what I wanted to look for. It’s like going from New York to Philadelphia through Chicago.

- The keyboard shortcuts to resize feedback text are uneven: yes, Cmd -- is shrink, but Cmd-+ that you use for increase (or, rather Cmd-Shift-=) is not “increase” anywhere else on Mac—it’s not in the HIG at all.

- Finally, why is it impossible to see a list of grades or to have submission comments available in the inbox? Bringing these very standard web features to mobile would be great for quality-of-life.

If you are using Canvas for your online course or summer program, you need CanvasTeacher! We’ve been using Canvas more & more over the past year for our grant-funded undergraduate research program at a state university, and have relied on it heavily since mid-March when we were ordered to work remotely. Over 3 months later, I am just realizing there is a Canvas app and I can do pretty much anything I need to do right from my phone....add/edit assignments, grade & make comments on student submissions, etc. it’s even better using CanvasTeacher because I get a notification right to my phone every time a student submits an assignment or adds a comment. Already making my life so much easier and I WISH I had downloaded it months ago!!

The Canvas Teacher app is a must-have tool for instructors and schools utilizing Canvas CMS. I encourage all my students to use the Canvas Student app to conveniently receive notifications, check grades, and communicate with Inbox.
I’ve done surveys showing 75% of my students use their smartphones for accessing Canvas, and this is the best tool to encourage more effective interaction with the student.
Canvas Instructor keeps getting better. There have been glitches, and confusing menu structures, or tools not available as they are of the web portal, but they keep improving it, so I feel confident in using it in the future and recommending it now. Tech support is fantastic.

The Teacher app exits if I touch or write too close to the bottom of the screen. This may be a "feature" of iOS but is extremely annoying. Wasted time is the worst feature of CanvasTeacher .

Sometimes, Teacher crashes when I try to swipe left or right to the next assignment to be graded. I curse when this happens. It is awful (CanvasTeacher , that is, my cursing is quite satisfying).

I find that the slider for entering a score oftens jumps to the next higher or lower number wheen I let go of the sldier. The slider seems to have been modified to have clicks between scores now, but the problem persists.

Once in awhile I get red lines being drawn when I try to scroll down with two fingers. This might be acsribed to only one finger being sensed, but the problem seems to be more related to some kind of state the program is in.

Another issue seems to be occurring at a higher level than the Teacher app itself. This issue is that, when I login to Canvas on my iPad, the Teacher app insists on popping up instead of the dashboard. I have to kill the teacher app to get out of it--it has taken over my Canvas access.

I only use teacher for grading and have no view on other features.

Mind boggling! Even after two bug fixing updates major bugs will have you lose comments. As you type comments, if you rotate the iPad and view switches to portrait or landscape, your comments get erased! Anything you type can vanish just by tilting your iPad!

Unbelievable, even after latest update: In Speedgrader while in landscape mode on iPad, long comments cannot be submitted as the submit buttons vanishes. If you then turn the iPad to portrait mode, your comments get erased! Anything you type can vanish just by tilting your iPad! Outrageous waste of time. CanvasTeacher dev team is utterly incompetent. I loathe CanvasTeacher, but am required to use it.

Old (and still valid) review

Needs resizing of the Grade/Comments/File column in Grading mode

CanvasTeacher is not too bad, except for the fact that in grading view you cannot resize the column with comments. I have to grade hundreds of paper, and my eyesight is not great. It’s imperative you allow a resize of the Grade/Comments/File column. This would allow annotation with Apple Pencil on the full screen, and then typing comments in a larger space than that tiny column. This is a HUGE oversight to an obvious feature. It makes me wonder if any of these dev have any experience grading and teaching. Please fix this! Until then 2 stars.

I used CanvasTeacher extensively last year and loved it. I never had problems and was able to grade on the go, sync grades from my phone/iPad, and do all of the other things that I could do on the desktop version.

All of a sudden, now CanvasTeacher is a total disaster. It has stopped loading student submissions most of the time in the speed grader section, won’t allow me to assign grades for assignments, and I can’t sync my grades to our LMS from CanvasTeacher anymore. The option for that is completely gone from the menu. On the rare instances when I can actually get it to load a student submission for a given assignment, it hangs up after every student and makes me hit the done button and come back in to see any further student submissions.

I’m sorely disappointed! This is an expensive product, and these issues are totally unacceptable; especially after using it so successfully last year. How did we go backwards?

The Canvas Teacher app is a must-have tool for instructors and schools utilizing Canvas CMS. I encourage all my students to use the Canvas Student app to conveniently receive notifications, check grades, and communicate with Inbox.
I’ve done surveys showing 75% of my students use their smartphones for accessing Canvas, and this is the best tool to encourage more effective interaction with the student.
Canvas Instructor keeps getting better. There have been glitches, and confusing menu structures, or tools not available as they are of the web portal, but they keep improving it, so I feel confident in using it in the future and recommending it now. Tech support is fantastic.

I really love CanvasTeacher except that as the person in charge of teaching in my school/college I’m a default member on many sites. Some sites we can’t auto-subscribe students to because they aren’t for a specific class (eg academic advising). Because of my role on those sites I get alerts for hundreds of students accepting the invitation! I’ve had to turn off notifications all together because there were so many alerts but now I can’t see the things I really need to see, like if a student posts a question in the discussion forum. Please create a method for teachers to select the different things they want to be notified about (or not). I guess kind of like how that one social media app lets us choose if we want to have an email notification if we have a new friend request, are tagged in a photo, etc. Thanks.

This is my first time using Canvas instead of Google Classroom. Here are a few things that I wish were different on Canvas:
1) the grading writing with a pen- I wish I could change the thickness of the stylus. When I zoom in, the pen is so thick so it makes it very challenging to leave good comments.
2) the grading with a highlighter- I wish I could highlight student written work. I can only highlight the types text from the pdf, but I like using the highlighter so it doesn’t completely cover their work (unlike the pen)
3) the grading text. When I type comments, it doesn’t quickly/easily fit into the text box. I will type the comment, then change the box size to be more square shaped and the text doesn’t automatically change size. When I do change the font size to be smaller, the text box automatically goes back to the default size (long and skinny rectangle when I would like it to stay as a square)

I have had CanvasTeacher on my iPhone for a while, but I don’t use it much. One of my problems with it is sending out emails. As long as I am replying to one of my students I don’t have a problem with this, but when I want to send out a new email, I get presented with a list of ALL the Canvas classes that we have for me, both active and inactive, and there is no way to tell them apart in the class list without going into each one and seeing if I have students in the class.

When accessing this function from the website, I am only presented with a list of my active classes. So, it is easy to find the one I want. It would sure be nice if CanvasTeacher would do the same thing so that I don’t have to hunt through ALL of my inactive classes to find the few active ones.

Unfortunately, for groups it isn’t working properly. I have to enter the grade multiple times (once per group member, but without name identifiers—in other words, you can’t take advantage of it to differentiate between individuals). Then, after I enter the grade over and over for each team member, it gets hung up, so I have to close it and start over for the next group. UGH! It does this on both my phone and iPad, so it is CanvasTeacher and not the device. I hope they fix this soon!

CanvasTeacher is a disaster, and even worse than the SpeedGrader which I am happy to say I still have in this iPad.
1. I teach by Module. Each Module has supporting material as well as the week’s assignment. Why then is there no Module I can work with in the sidebar? This I’m guessing is why my students rarely do their reading or video assignments — they seem to be unaware of them if they are using CanvasTeacher . PLEASE ADD MODULES TO THE APPS.
2. Where is my custom Dashboard with my system of colours that allows me to instantly recognise which class is which?
3. I am constantly losing sentences I have carefully constructed for my students as commentary on their work. Where are they going? Sometimes I want to copy something from another student’s comment field and when I come back my current comments are gone. How about a clipboard feature inside CanvasTeacher so we can save often-used comments, like “Please submit this assignment” and “please read the instructions?”
4. Why couldn’t I see my students’ uploads of .pngs and .jpgs on my new iPhone 8 plus? I teach digital art.I take off so-and-so many points per week late...
5. I like having access to the due date of the assignment (and the parameters) so I can make a wise grading choice.
6. I like the speech-to-text feature but it is a hornet’s nest of, um, hornets.

Hi! So I just discovered there was a teacher app last night! I am ecstatic. I just finished grading some things. A couple of things I’d like to see is a way to see our comments to students on speedgrader like we can on a computer. Another thing I’d like is to be able to view “modules” for each class. It’s one of the few options not showing. And while I can view most all of it from other sections, having to go to them makes them so much harder to find and access. I’d also like the ability to view my grade books in each class. As of now, those are my suggestions. It does seem really easy to use. If it had had these features, then I would have given a 5 star rating.

I am torn on this update. I am glad to finally be able to see (and edit ) long file names. I, however, no longer seem to be able to move files easily between folders. I also don’t seem to be able to adjust the course view for the students. I do not use discussions or collaborations on canvas. I had to logon with my web browser to do these things. I also needed to login to add links to pages. Having to access canvas by two means is not ideal. Also on a recent update, I am no longer able to upload files through CanvasTeacher reliably; this seems to be file size related. I also can no longer delete folders and files.

CanvasTeacher is extremely disappointing. I would give it zero stars if I could. It runs excruciatingly slow, is incredibly unstable, and all around very frustrating to use. The worst part is that it’s always been that way. Upgrades do nothing to improve CanvasTeacher. When I really get frustrated I will switch over to Speed Grader on the browser version to use instead. It’s just as bad. Making annotations and notes on student work is nearly impossible. Please get your IT people together at Canvas to finally create a grading app that is as good as the rest of your management system which is fantastic. The new update has made a terrible app even worse. Whoops, whoops, whoops. That’s all I get for my assignments now. This is worthless.

There's no option for taking attendance. If the students make a video comment in the discussion forum that needs to be graded, you cannot see it in the grading section, you have to look at the discussion thread directly. I don't have access to the full features of Canvas (modules, files, etc). I was hoping CanvasTeacher would combine the features of the regular Canvas App and Speed Grader, but I still need two Canvas-related apps to have access to everything I need.

When I look on CanvasTeacher , it says I have 60 items to grade. Yet, when I click on any of the assignments, I get an error message and can’t view the assignment or the items to be graded. Even worse, CanvasTeacher says that there are items to grade that DO NOT APPEAR in my actual course. When I go to my actual course, on my laptop, I can’t find any such assignments anywhere-(because they were deleted by me before they were ever published.) I can’t tell though-is CanvasTeacher giving me incorrect information, or are there really 60 instances of student work that I can’t grade because I can’t find what they submitted.

What is the point of having an app on my phone that is not synced with the actual course? You people and your app are KILLING ME.