TUHSD Canvas Overview

Canvas LMS is a popular learning management system (LMS) used by educational institutions around the world. It's a cloud-based platform that allows teachers to create and manage online courses, deliver materials, communicate with students, and track progress. 

Below you will find some basic information about TUHSD's Canvas setup. For any general Canvas questions, check out the Canvas Instructor Guide page.

User Accounts

Student and teacher accounts are created by Synergy and synced over to Canvas (via a nightly sync) a day after changes are made in Synergy. Other user accounts are manually created by IT upon request.

Parent accounts are created by parents. Instructions can be found on our website.

Courses

Canvas courses are generated by Synergy and are created/updated (via a nightly sync) a day after changes are made in Synergy. At the beginning of the year, this is dependent on the master schedule being completed for all schools. This tends to happen a day or two before the 1st day of school.

Term dates control access to Canvas courses. In case you need to extend student access to a course, go to Settings and change the Participation dropdown from Term to Course. Adjust dates as necessary but please remember to change it back to Term once done so that those courses do not show up for students or their parents (on the Grades page) the following semester. 

Sections

Each period of a course is a section in Synergy. Sections that belong to the same course (same course title in Synergy) are grouped under a single course shell in Canvas. Should you need to separate one or more sections into a separate Canvas course (crosslisting), refer to this article: How do I split a Canvas course into multiple courses?

If a student is added or removed from a section in Synergy, Canvas will reflect that change the following day.

Dashboard

You can select which courses show up on your dashboard by going to Courses > All Courses (in the left sidebar) and toggling the star icon.