{"id":4191,"date":"2017-05-11T10:50:22","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T00:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sydney.edu.au\/education-portfolio\/ei\/teaching@sydney\/?p=4191"},"modified":"2017-07-14T11:10:52","modified_gmt":"2017-07-14T01:10:52","slug":"thinking-canvas-using-pages-make-unit-come-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/thinking-canvas-using-pages-make-unit-come-alive\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking in Canvas: Using pages to make your unit come alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

As we move our units to Canvas over the next few semesters, we have a chance to reimagine the way that our unit of study sites look and behave. We highlighted in the first ‘Thinking in Canvas’ article<\/a> how Canvas has a fundamentally different approach to presenting material – an entity called ‘pages’. Canvas pages can look and feel like normal webpages, which means that your unit site can break out of an item-by-item structure that our current learning management system (LMS) imposes. In this article we compare how unit sites might look and behave differently in Canvas, and show a few visually appealing templates that you could use when designing your own Canvas sites.<\/p>\n

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Side-by-side<\/h2>\n

To give you an idea of how a Canvas page can make your unit’s material more fluid, dynamic, inviting, and meaningful, here is a side-by-side comparison of resources surrounding a single class in a particular week of the semester, as currently exists in Blackboard and how it might look in Canvas. (Click the thumbnails to see the entire image).<\/p>\n

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\"Screenshot<\/a>
Content for pre- and post-class work in Blackboard.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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\"Screenshot<\/a>
Content for pre- and post-class work as it might appear in Canvas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Notably, Canvas pages allow you to structure unit material in a much more website-like way. Apart from the fluid structure of the page itself, you can include elements such as:<\/p>\n