1.5 | Customizing Course Visuals Transcript
In this video, you will learn how to customize the home page banners and buttons that are pre-loaded in the Cañada College Course Template.
When you first import the course template, you'll notice that the home page, or Front Page, has already been established. This is home page option number one. However, this course template contains three home page options from which you may select.
Navigate to Pages in the Course Navigation Menu and then select to view All Pages where you can then see home page one, which again has the little Front Page tag indicating that this is the current home page. You can also take a look at home page option number two or home page option number three. Each of these home page templates has a similar layout, however, contains different visual elements that you can customize to meet your specific needs. There's home page one. Here's a brief look at home page two, and finally, home page three.
When you're ready to begin customizing your course home page, navigate to Modules in the Course Navigation Menu. Here you'll see the Instructions for Teachers module, which contains a page called Icons, Banners and Buttons Customization Options. You'll notice an icon catalog, these icons have been preloaded to the course and cannot be customized. However, the home page banners and buttons can be. These are Google Drawings that you can make a copy of so that you can update the colors, images and text to meet your course needs. If I scroll a little further down the page, I see the same option, but for each of the home page buttons. I'm going to scroll back up to the top so that we can focus in our tutorial video on banners.
Let's say you like home page option two. When you're ready to customize this image and make it your own select the home page banner to link. Doing so will prompt you to "make a copy" of this Google Drawing so that you can begin to have your own copy and customize it. When you select to "make a copy" it will take you into Google Draw, where you can now begin to update the text, the colors and the image.
Let's say, for example, you teach a Chemistry class. You can update the text, the colors, and of course, put in your course title. You can also change the image to be more relevant to your discipline. Highlight the existing image and right click. When you do so, select the option that says Replace Image and then locate the image, you'd like to replace it with. Some common places to find images are Pixabay, Flickr, or of course your own repository. Once you've located the image, select Open. You can also change or add some of the other visual layouts to help bring the colors together to match your new image. So we'll just brighten up this yellow a little bit. Okay, and now you have your updated banner.
When you're ready to download this as a new file, what you want to do first is remove the text that says "copy of" from the image title. This is an important step to swapping out the old banner in the Course Template with your updated customized banner. So now we have a banner 2, and we're going to select File, Download as a PNG. That will go to the location on your computer wherever your downloads go.
Returning to Canvas, select Files from the Course Navigation Menu. Here, you'll notice that each of the respective images for the different home page templates have been loaded into folders. Keeping in mind that we selected Home Page 2, we'll select the home page two images folder. Here we see the banner that's already in the template. What we want to do is replace this with the banner 2 image that we just customized and downloaded. You can either drag and drop your file into the right side of this image, excuse me page, or you can use the Upload button to locate your new banner 2. Then select Open and when you do so, because the two images have the exact same file name, which is what we want, it will automatically replace the old image with your new image. So I'm going to select Replace.
Now, when I return to my home page template, you might at first think, hey, it didn't work, it's still showing the old image. However, if you refresh your browser, you'll see that the old image has been swapped out for your new image.
Now, if you decided to work with Home Page Banner, or excuse me, home page template one, and you've completed these steps, your work is done because home page one is already set in the course to be the Front Page. However, if you've decided to use home page two or home page three, there's one more step you'll need to take in order to tell Canvas to use this updated page as the Front Page.
Navigate to Pages in the Course Navigation Menu. Go over to the More Options Menu and select to make this particular home page template the Front Page. Doing so will allow Canvas to swap the home page Front Page, and you will now see your beautiful work illustrated in your course.
Thank you very much for watching.