Canvas Groupsallowsyoutodivide (or letdivide) studentsintogroups. This tool alsocreates a group page per group in whichstudentscan share files anddiscuss. These files are onlyvisibletoteachersandtheaddedstudents.
With this tool, as a teacher, I can:
manually or automatically assign students to groups;
ask students to sign up for groups you have created;
reuse the group assignment within Canvas Discussions, Group Assignments, Peer Review, and FeedbackFruits tools. For example, you can specify that a discussion is only accessible to a certain group or assign an assignment to all groups.
Allow students to create their own Announcements, Pages and Discussions in their group page.
Watch an impression of Canvas Groups
Why should I use this tool?
With this tool, the group format within a course only needs to be created once. After this you can reuse the format within the Canvas environment and Feedbackfruits.
Students can register themselves for a group of their choice, as the groups for example work on different themes or meet at different times. You can save a lot of time with this self-registration.
What is this tool less suitable for?
With Canvas groups you are not offering a platform for collaboration. If you want to facilitate this, you can choose Microsoft Teams; the features that the group page offers are also possible in Teams. In addition, Teams offers the options to work in synchronous files and to hold meetings.
To encourage students to use Canvas Groups, we recommend using this tool explicitly as a work format, at the beginning of your course and throughout the course of instruction. Students will otherwise (probably) make little use of the group page features.
Students will participate more actively in a Canvas group when they have met and gotten to know their groupmates before. For example, in the first study group, you might ask students to make arrangements with their groupmates for collaboration through Canvas Groups at that time.
