https://www.youtube.com/embed/BISNY7XnCmI

This Week's App: Atomic Search for Canvas

What is Atomic Search?

Have you ever wished you could quickly search all your Canvas content to find something? If you answered yes then this tool is for you. Atomic Search for Canvas is an tool made by the company Atomic Jolt. It allows teachers, students and administrators to search through all of their Canvas course content quickly and easily. It's a great tool for students and teachers alike who need to find specific information within their Canvas courses.

What can it be used for?

Well the obvious answer is to search Canvas, but the real questions here are what does it search and how can searching Canvas be useful? To the first question, Atomic Search can search words and phrases across pages, assignments, discussions, and files in a Canvas course. Basically it searches everything. Admins can even use it to search courses across accounts.

Atomic Search can search words and phrases across pages, assignments, discussions, and files in a Canvas course.

Now how can these search features be useful? Well Josh and his team have gotten to test the tool for quite awhile and after testing here are there 3 top suggestions for how a search tool can help teachers, students, or administrators.

1. Students can key term/word search - With Atomic Search, your students can easily find where you mention any topic across their Canvas course. Imagine if they are writing a paper on a certain topic, they can easily search every reference to that topic in the course to find what you or the class has said on it. They can focus on learning and not worry about where to find something in the course.
2. Teachers/Designers can easily find references - If you help develop courses in Canvas you know it can be a pain when you are changing out resources, content, or books to find every reference to that content to clean it up and update the course. Atomic Search makes that super easy, we tested finding a textbook to replace and it found it everywhere, including PDFs in the course.
3. Admins can easily track down information - People who have admin permissions in Canvas and provide support know it can be hard to find content in Canvas when a student cant give clear information. With this tool you can easily just search it across all the courses in Canvas.

These are just a few of the uses we found, but we are sure you and your teams could find countless more. If you want to see how the tool works, check out their Atomic Search Page to see video and screenshot examples.

How do I get started?

While the at the HiTech Podcast we like to suggest free tools when we can, sometimes a tool is so good that we have to share it even though it isn't free. This is one of those cases, Atomic Search is not free and to find out how much it costs you would need to get a quote. You can contact them on the Atomic Search Page to find out more information.

After you got a quote or talked with Atomic Jolt you will need to get in touch with the team that administers your Canvas. They will need to help install the app and they will most likely have a process you need to follow to evaluate the app and approve it for use. From there if that is done and you get it installed you can start playing with it. Note they will sometimes do free tests where you get temporary access, we highly recommend that, there support team is fantastic!