For many years and many graduating classes, the school has used ItsLearning as students’ classes online presence. However, this will change next year. The familiar ItsLearning will soon be replaced with a new platform, called Canvas.

Canvas is a learning platform created by Instructure, a company whose focus is creating educational tools for students. 2008, the same year that the company was founded, canvas was developed. “It’s not super new because a couple universities have used it for multiple years, I think that is why CCISD finally moved towards it,” Mrs. Hawkins said.

While the school has been using ItsLearning for years the decision to switch to Canvas was made due to Canvas being a more user-friendly learning platform.

“One of the reasons we liked canvas when we were looking at it in its trial period is, ItsLearning had issues linking assignments to calendars because you had to put the assignment in ItsLearning for it to be visible on the calendar, and it wasn’t always super compatible, and canvas had a very interactive calendar so every student could essentially go and see what you’re doing every day.” Mrs. Hawkins said. “So, right now it’s like Itslearning doesn’t link up the planner to the calendar, it just links the assignments to the calendar, so this way you can see literally what every teacher is doing every day, and
then what assignment they’re assessing on. It’s also much more user friendly, theirs drag and drop option where itslearning is mostly uploading so it seemed like it made it easier for the teacher to spend less time organizing.”

When making the decision to transition to a different learning platform the school looked at many different platforms.

“Schoology was another one we looked at, it had a lot of limits on turning in assignments and things like that,” Mrs. Hawkins said.

Mrs. Hawkins feels that the transition from Itslearning to Canvas will benefit students in the long run due to many colleges using the platform.

“One of the reasons we fought really hard for canvas is a lot of universities use it,” Mrs. Hawkins said. “It was just going to be a more seamless transition, for you, if you are going to secondary school, off to college, post high school life, that’s one less thing in college you have to worry about.”

Even though the school has been using itslearning for years now, initially, when making the decision of what platform to use, Canvas was the top choice, the only drawback was the expensive price. Though this switch may be an adjustment it may just be one for the better.