techieMusings

Over the last 2 days, I heard demos from two Learning Management Systems – Canvas and Haiku.  I am in love with Canvas and have been for some time.  It is so feature rich and user-friendly.  It has a very clean look and there aren’t excessive “clicks”.  The ability to drag-and-drop within: 1. the Calendar (to move assignment dates around and then dynamically updating that assignment and alert message throughout) and 2. for files is really a beautiful feature.

The rubric for grading is also an awesome feature that Canvas has.  The Speed Grader App is also available for the iPad, so you can do your grading on the go.  Not to mention the ability to leave audio and video feedback!!!  I love that students see the rubric with the assignment so they will know exactly how they will be graded.  Haiku is working on integrating the rubric feature in the future.  

I felt like the quizzing feature was similar in both LMS and typing math equations didn’t seem too difficult (for teacher or student).

Only the Canvas calendar allowed exporting to other calendars (like iCal, Google Calendar, etc.).  The look of the calendar was also much more visually pleasing in Canvas.

Finally, Canvas has conferencing features (shared whiteboard, chats, collaboration, etc).  I’m not sure how well this works, but if it works well and the price is included, this could be a huge advantage.

BUT, cost-wise, Haiku is much cheaper for the whole school.  And there are multiple K-12 schools that I know are using Haiku, whereas I don’t know of any high schools in the area using Canvas.  So will Canvas potentially be glitchy?  Will it integrate as well with other databases at our school?  Those kind of questions I’m less certain about at this point…