In order to make sure you are ready to start teaching in Canvas, please take a few minutes to review these critical universal settings. Once you are comfortable with these settings, move onto creating or updating your profile and introducing yourself to the class.

Profile

Setting up a profile in Canvas is an opportunity to give students some background on your experience and credentials. Adding a bio and image to your profile will help personalize the interactions in your course. For example, your avatar image on your profile also shows up next to your posts on the discussion board, or alongside Inbox messages.

Profile Suggestions

Show off your experience and expertise in your field.
Help students connect to you by telling them a little about yourself.
Add a good picture so your students can put a face to your name.

View an example profile

Canvas guide on Profiles

Watch a video about Canvas profiles

Notifications

Canvas, by default, will notify you with email of new messages, student submissions, and several other events in your course. You can (and should) customize this by adding alternate email addresses and changing the notification defaults to your liking. That said, the defaults are a good starting point that you can tweak as you use Canvas if you would prefer to receive more or fewer notifications.

Canvas guide on Notifications

Watch a video about Canvas notifications

Other tools and accounts

Canvas integrates with several web tools such as Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you hook your Google account into Canvas, for example, you can seamlessly create Google Docs and invite students as fellow editors for collaborative work.

Canvas guide on adding Google account (similar process for other account options)