Calendar - How do you build a calendar?

TYPES OF CALENDAR ITEMS

The Canvas Calendar has three basic types of items: appointments, assignment due dates, and custom events.

Appointments

For those who hold student conferences, Canvas has a very convenient scheduler feature Links to an external site.. You can create sign-up sheets that students can then access. The great advantage here is that while you have access to the entire sheet, students will only see their time and will receive a reminder for their appointment.

Assignments

Assignments in the calendar come with icons indicating the type of assignment. Remember, these are automatically generated whenever you create an assignment. In the image below, there is an essay and a quiz due on the 1st of the month. Please note, actual due dates in the calendar DO NOT include the word DUE. It will only have the assignment name (this will be important below).

In some cases, you may give a student an extension on an assignment. Links to an external site. Look in week 2 of the example. There is a quiz due on the 8th but one student has been given an extension. Look at the 11th and you will see another due date for quiz with "1 student" in parentheses indicating that one student has been given the extension.

You can quickly change assignment due dates by dragging the calendar item from one date to another. For example, if you moved Essay 1 from the first of the month to the fourth, this change would be reflected in the assignment as well. When an assignment due date has passed, the due date will have a strikethrough.

Custom Events

Custom events Links to an external site. can serve multiple purposes.

In the sample calendar below, there are reading assignments (for example, look at the third, the seventh, and the 11th). The advantage of putting the reading assignments here rather than in a document is that students will receive reminders in their Canvas feed.

A popular way of using discussions is to have students create an initial post on one date and then come back a couple of days later and post a response. Ideally, then, discussions would allow for multiple due dates: one for the initial post and one for the response. Unfortunately, this feature, while in great demand Links to an external site., has not yet been implemented. What you can do, instead, is a create a second "due date" using the custom events feature.  

In the calendar below, there is an official due date on the 5th (DB#1). On the 8th, is the secondary due date. You will notice that this secondary due is a custom event. Like the reading assignments discussed above, students will receive reminders in their feed.

In order to keep your custom event titles short, you can provide more information to your students by clicking on "More Options" on the edit window, giving you a Details page to write in.  You can also use this Details page to link the custom event to any other content in your course.