By: Lily Ruppert

Sometimes the hardest part of starting assignments is finding the motivation to open your Canvas page, but we don’t need great bursts of motivation—just the smallest things can be enough. Decorating your Canvas page, for instance, is a simple and easy-to-do change that encourages you to open your laptop and get some assignments done.
I spoke with freshmen Jordan Barden and Amanda Hartnett about Canvas page customization. Jordan was the one who introduced me to BetterCanvas, the Chrome extension needed to customize your Canvas page. The extension is quick to download and easy to use. You have several options for how you can customize Canvas; you can completely personalize it, adding your own images to each class, picking your own color palette, choosing your own font, and so on. However, if you just want a quick and easy change, there are also dozens of pre-made themes for any aesthetic or interest. Jordan said that he recently changed his Canvas page from Taco Bell to silly cats. Amanda used canvas since 6th grade but had Chrome extensions blocked from her school computer. Now she makes a point to change her canvas page once a month to fit the season. “It's the only reason I go into Canvas,” she said. “Anything that decorates any of your academics makes you want to do it.” I personally took the opportunity to make my own theme and assigned Garfield pictures to each class—seeing the dreaded list of assignments beneath each class is much less intimidating when Garfield looms above it.
“One of the options BetterCanvas is to show your grade, so it's not only aesthetically motivated, but it's also an academic motivator in which you can see in how you're doing at that certain time, and I think that's very useful,” Jordan commented. BetterCanvas does have a wide array of options for page customization beyond themes; you can put Canvas into dark mode (and even schedule a time for it to switch to dark mode), show relative due dates for assignments, improve your to-do list, add a tentative GPA calculator, and much more. Considering this is the place online where we as students spend so much of our time, why shouldn’t we turn it into something that is more comfortable and pleasing to us?
During this final stretch of classes, take a moment to breathe and add a little joy into. your life by customizing your Canvas page in a way that makes you laugh a little. The best way to combat stress is humor (and God knows there's a lot of stress to combat in the upcoming weeks.)
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