Parent App vs. Student App

haltcatchfire

We had a question come up about the Canvas Parent app vs. the Canvas app, and I’d love to hear how other schools are handling this.

We now have students in Canvas from primary through high school. Some of our parents have discovered that they can log in to the Student app and see more information than they can in the Parent app.

Would you recommend that parents of younger students use the Student app and those with older students use the Parent App? Or is it better practice to recommend that all parents only use the Parent App?

We’re trying to figure out the best approach and what guidance we should give our families. Thanks!

Dianna

Parent observers can actually log in to either the parent or the student app and the experience is different. Some parents prefer the Canvas Student App because they are able to view actual submissions and teacher feedback or annotations to assignments. They also have the ability to see experience the course exactly how the student sees it. The parent app is designed to give parents a centralized view and custom notifications.

Both experiences are read only, which should alleviate concern about the access parent observers may have when logging into the student app.

One of the negatives we see about parent observers logging into the student app is that they do not have the ability to toggle between multiple children. Everything is on the main dashboard which can be overwhelming and challenging to manage. In the Parent app, there are specific settings for notifications that observers can establish. These include grade alerts for the course and assignments (both low and high), missing assignments, and course/global announcements.

Both apps have pros and cons so it may be something that is a use case decision or in our instance, some parents use the parent app for the majority of their interactions. However, they like knowing that they can log into the student app with their parent observer credentials for a more detailed view.