We're the Tech Team at Richmond High School, about 30 students spread across a dozen different class periods. While we're rarely all in the same room at once, we run everything through a manually created Canvas course. Our advisor, Jeremy Hill (we just call him Hill), drops people in and out as schedules change. The first time we (MG, Miley, Sophia, Emma, Grace, and Luz) sat down together was to write this blog, all about how we brought Canvas Legends to Richmond.
Where the idea started
This idea of Canvas Legends isn't ours originally, and we want to say that up front. Hill saw a presentation on Canvas Legends from the University of Notre Dame at InstructureCon and brought it to us. We later learned Cornell had been running something similar of their own, a program called Canvas Course Spotlight, built around the same basic idea: let students say which courses are actually working for them.
We didn't reinvent anything. We just took an idea two other schools had already proven out and built our own version for a high school.
A poll that turned into a movement
It started with a Canvas announcement asking students to vote on who had the best-organized Canvas page in the school. We picked our winner based on organization, clarity, communication, how the page looked, and accessibility. One AP history teacher won for something almost embarrassingly simple: a single button at the top of her page linking straight to the reading materials her class needed every day.
"You don't realize how much time that saves until you don't have to spend it searching," Emma shared.
Building the presentation, and teaching our own teachers
We call our process "app stacking." We took our page and student submissions, ran them through a couple of tools to shape the content, then designed a certificate for our winning teacher. We put Dolly Parton on it, because she loves Dolly Parton, and it got a real laugh at the professional development session.
Walking into a room of our own teachers to present was different from any conference we'd done before. Strangers are one thing. Your own staff is another.
"It was actually kind of comforting. I walked in expecting to be nervous, and it just felt like a room full of friendly faces," Sophia said.
A few days later, a teacher we'd planned to help happened to be sitting in the same room as one of us at lunch. Instead of an email back and forth, we just asked him right there what he needed. He needed help organizing resources for his AP class. We sat down and fixed it on the spot.
A trick, an award, and what's next
There's a small detail we love sharing: typing "/undelete" into a course URL to recover something that's gone missing. People light up every time they learn it.
Hill has a good way of explaining why fixes like that happen so fast here. With about 80 teachers in the building and 30 of us on the Tech Team, there's a good chance you've got a Tech Team student in your room right now, or you've at least had one before. That means help is usually just a hallway away instead of a ticket. As Hill put it, it's like deploying a bunch of small problem-solvers throughout the whole building.
We're already planning a follow-up session, and this time we're collecting everyone's questions up front instead of waiting for them to come up one at a time. We're also running a school-wide vote for Canvas improvement awards at the end of the semester. One's already named: the Meme Mail Award, for a teacher who gets things fixed faster because she asks for help in memes.
If your school doesn't have something like this yet
Do it. You'll never regret trying, and your version won't look like ours, or like Notre Dame's, or like Cornell's. That's kind of the whole point. Three completely different schools landed on the same idea: let the students say what's working. Imagine what happens when a few more join in!
If you need a one sentence reason to get started, Hill already has it. We use one line in every presentation we give: raise your hand if your school has problems. Every hand goes up. Raise your hand if your school has students. There's your solution.
— Richmond High School Tech Team
