StrongMind News

The StrongMind curriculum and creative teams have been working hard to provide your younger learners with an even more engaging and meaningful experience. Enhancements for the K-5 core curriculum were made to provide a tighter alignment to identified standards and improve the overall user experience and increase engagement.

Additionally, more that 1,500 videos, images, and interactives have been added to the existing K-5 curriculum for 23-24 school year courses. See below for a VIP sneak preview!

The Attendance tool can be used for online or face-to-face courses. Enabled at the account level, the Roll Call Attendance tool can be used by all courses in the Canvas account.

With the Attendance tool, instructors can keep track of course attendance by taking roll electronically. Instructors can choose to view the tool in a list or grid format and can customize the placement of each student in the seating chart.

When you take attendance using Roll Call, Canvas automatically adds Attendance as an assignment. The default point value for attendance is 100 points. A late student will earn 80% by default. Teachers can create and assign badges for students like "great participation" or "unprepared for class today". View the video below for an overview of this tool.

About 80% of your StrongMind curriculum is automatically computer graded, and about 20% requires teacher interaction. You can find the location of all teacher graded items by accessing the Teacher Resource Guide for that course, and now those questions contain grading notes! Grading notes will populate for open ended questions in SpeedGrader. These notes will provide an exemplar response to compare to student responses and aid in determining the appropriate score for that question.

Canvas has released several new feature options. Make sure to schedule time with your Customer Success Manager to map out your back to school needs.

Alyssa is the newest member of our Customer Success Team. Before joining StrongMind, she worked for the School District of Philadelphia for 14 yrs. During her time there, she taught 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade, was an Intervention Specialist and a Digital Literacy Teacher. Most recently she held the position as a School Technology Coordinator, where she discovered her love for EdTech!

Alyssa joins us from the East Coast where she lives just outside of Philadelphia (Go Birds!) with her husband, four children and two dogs. Regarding hobbies, she hopes to re-discover them again in the near future, as her family keeps her very busy! However, now having a built-in teen babysitter, she enjoys having the occasional 'date night' with her husband. On her list of favorite places, Las Vegas and Jamaica are at the top!