Announcing Apple iWork Update in Canvas LMS

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Announcing Apple iWork Update in Canvas LMS

I figure there might be a couple more of us interested in this on this forum. Though given how wide-spread Microsoft Office and Google Workspace are, I don’t think this’ll make too much of a difference in anyone’s day.

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I use Canvas LMS. I have to say that using SpeedGrader on macOS is a PITA but using SpeedGrader on iPadOS through the Canvas iPad app is quite nice.

The real downside to using Canvas grading with any OS is the inability to export graded works with embedded annotations. When I have to create an administrative report to document how I grade across my homework or exam submissions, I absolute will not use Canvas SpeedGrader. I will instead always prefer to export the student-submitted works as PDFs from Canvas, import them to an iPadOS PDF app (PDFExpert in this case), annotate, and re-upload the marked-up PDFs to Canvas.

In summary, the improvements in Canvas to recognize Apple iWorks documents are applauded because they certainly can benefit students who work best within the Apple ecosystem … but only as long as the instructor also accepts documents that are sourced from the Apple ecosystem.

Otherwise, I insist on PDF files at all submissions, with only modest excepts for “activatable programming files” such as spreadsheets or python code.

Thanks for the notice, even as you say if it only makes a minor difference in a small group of folks here.

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JJW

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This is an issue in pretty much every LMS. I used to have to do this for D2L Brightspace when I taught with it.