T2MTU: “Message Students Who”
April 5, 2022
Amanda Dills, ID3
For the next few weeks, our Tuesday Tune Ups are going to focus on specific features to save you time in Canvas. (This “work smarter not harder” concept will also be the topic of an upcoming ID3 summer workshop, so keep an eye out for more information on that!)
One simple example of this “smarter not harder” principle is the “Message Students Who” feature in the Canvas gradebook. This feature allows you to instantly send a Canvas message to all students who meet a specific parameter for a specific assignment – for example, you could send a message to all students who haven’t yet submitted an assignment, or one to all students who scored below a certain score threshold on a quiz.
This feature will save you having to scroll through your gradebook and manually add individual students into a message, and it is the topic of today’s Tuesday 2-Minute Tune Up.
Click the link below to play a tutorial video or keep scrolling for written directions.
“Message Students Who” from your Canvas Gradebook
You can use the “Message Students Who” feature by going to the Canvas gradebook, and finding the specific assignment you wish to use as your criteria.
Then Click on the 3-dot menu that appears when you hover your mouse over that column heading. Select “Message Students Who.”
You should see a pop up window appear, and this is where you will select your criteria and write your message. Notice that as you start to select different criteria, you will see the names of the students who meet that criteria appear above the message, and you can manually remove specific students from this notification if you wish by clicking the small X.
You can update both the Subject and Message fields, and click Send Message when you are ready for the message to send.
To see the messages you have sent using this process, you can go to your Canvas Inbox, and use the drop down menu at the top to select “Sent” messages.
A couple of things to keep in mind if you use this Canvas feature:
- Students will only receive an email or a push notification on their device from this message if they have turned ON Canvas notifications for new “messages”, so if you plan to use this tool, you should definitely remind students to update their notification settings. (Click HERE for a T2MTU that explains this.)
- There are no formatting options within the message field using this process, but if you include a specific URL (whether from your course or outside of Canvas), that link will become clickable when the message is sent. (See example screenshot above.)
- If you plan to use this feature often, I would keep an unpublished page in your Canvas course that contains the text of the messages you’ve sent and the criteria you’ve used. This will both allow you to keep track of what you’ve sent in an easy-to-scan list, but it will also make it easy for you to copy and paste messages throughout your course.
If you have any questions on how you might use the “Message Students Who” feature in your course, please let us know.
*AND, if you are interested in setting up even more time-saving “Automations” like this one in your course, keep an eye out for our Summer Workshop Enrollment period, because ID3 is going to be offering a full-day workshop all on these kind of time-saver “set it and forget it” type features.
