Advanced Techniques with Canvas: Spicing up Content Pages

Presenter: Gregory Beyrer

Description: The Rich Content Editor (RCE) is ubiquitous in Canvas and we use it for just about every tool from Announcements to Content Pages to Assignments to Discussions. It responds to familiar keyboard shortcuts for formatting and has buttons to do most of the things that we want to do when working with content in Canvas. It also allows us to paste formatted text, so work we have done in other applications like Google Docs or Microsoft Word comes across more or less the way it was originally designed. This is because the RCE is what is called a WYSIWYG editor, an acronym that stands for What You See Is What You Get.

Like all web pages, the RCE uses a language (HTML) and a set of formatting instructions (CSS) to make web pages look the way they do. With just a bit of tinkering, we can use HTML and CSS to go beyond the basic formatting and make our text and images look more interesting. Adding some pizzazz or flair can keep the attention of visually abled students, and there are ways to do this while supporting all of our students. In this session, you will learn how to do the following with HTML and CSS:

• Float and pad an image
• Put text inside a simple box
• Put text inside a shadow box
• Use a formatted horizontal rule
• Make a tabbed page
• Insert a striped table

These techniques work with both the Classic Rich Content Editor and the New Rich Content Editor.

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