Overview

Overview Functional User Training

What are Design Tools for Canvas?
Some Analogies

For those who are not familiar with Canvas or Design Tools for Canvas, the tools can be difficult to explain. Here are some analogies that might help:

For home owners (or aspiring home owners):

If your Canvas course content is a house, Design Tools are the paint and landscaping that provide curb appeal (and the workers to help put it all in place).

For artists:

If your Canvas course is your masterpiece, Design Tools are your brushes and paints.

For power software users:

Design Tools are like macros that consolidate a variety of time consuming steps into a simpler process.

For car enthusiasts:

Design Tools are power steering for course creation. Taking something that can be difficult (but enjoyable) and making it easier.

In other words, the content is yours, Design Tools is there to help you create it and make it look good.

Design Tools for Canvas are composed of 3 different tools created to help rapidly build and style courses and content within the Canvas LMS.

Rich Content Editor Tools
The Original Design Tools

Style and organize your content in the rich content editor with little or no previous experience writing HTML or CSS.

Basic Design Tools Interface

Availability

Installed at the account level using Global CSS and Global JavaScript files and available within:

Content Pages
Assignments
Discussion Descriptions
Quiz Descriptions
Syllabus
Announcements

Experience Levels

Basic
Intermediate
Advanced

There are many things that you can do with the rich content editor tools. The tools have been designed so that you can show or hide many of the tools based on your comfort level (more on this later).

Extendability

Primary
Extended
Shared

Extended customizations can be added at the sub account level or shared between users.

Upload/Embed Image Tool
Rich Content Editor LTI Tool

Upload, Crop, Resize and embed images anywhere the rich content editor is available.

Upload/embed image tool interface

Multi Tool
Course Level LTI Tool

Tools for building your course shell

Multi-Tool Interface

Let's start with the rich content editor tools