This year LT has introduced Canvas to enhance the classroom experience for students and staff.

“The reality is that [this generation] consumes learning in different ways than its predecessors,” Director of Technology Ed Tennant said. “It’s cool, but it’s different and we’re working our way towards that. [Canvas] gives us that opportunity.”

Canvas is qualified as a learning management system (LMS)—a platform that creates a communication channel along with multimedia elements that can be shared by students and teachers online. Canvas offers features that LT did not have from the other services, such as Infinite Campus, Office 365, Edline or turnitin.com.

“We were finding that as teachers were working with students there were things they wanted to do with the students from an academic standpoint that some of the historic tools we were using didn’t provide solutions for,” Tennant said.

The technology department started looking for an LMS last year to solve this problem. Canvas was the best option out of the 340 LMS products on the market because it was geared toward a large high school like LT. For example, Canvas doesn’t require every teacher to input all of their students, rather it links with the data on student schedules from Infinite Campus.

This past January, a few teachers experimented with Canvas to see how they liked using it. After proving its success, the Department of Technology gained the Board of Education’s approval. Starting in July all teachers were offered the opportunity to attend training sessions to learn how to use Canvas. LT expected around 100 teachers to attend, but about 140 teachers were present at training, which was a huge success, Tennant said. Although not all teachers have integrated Canvas into the classroom yet, Tennant hopes that by the end of the year every student will have some experience with Canvas.

“From the perspective that [we have only been training since July], Canvas has been a pretty stunning success,” Tennant said. “Teachers really seem to be embracing it.”

Tennant hopes that Canvas will allow teachers to share, develop and communicate with students in a more meaningful way. On Canvas, teachers have the ability to share worksheets, comment on student’s submitted work, announce deadlines and important due dates. Canvas also has an app available for iOS and Android devices, which allows students to receive instant feedback from their teachers.

“I like that there is an app for it because I can receive immediate updates when teachers comment my work, compared to going online,” Pearl Truax ‘15 said.

Canvas’ goal is not to completely replace Infinite Campus, Office 365 or teacher webpages, but to allow for a more interactive and immediate learning tool, Tennant said.

“Canvas is really exciting because it’s in its infancy and it’s growing right now,” he said. “It’s very intuitive for teachers, because teachers that have had relatively little training have done some pretty fantastic things already.”