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Gold Plan Schools: Integration with Blackbaud, Canvas, PowerSchool Learning, Schoology, and other learning systems using LTI
Gold Plan Schools: Integration with Blackbaud, Canvas, PowerSchool Learning, Schoology, and other learning systems using LTI

Learn how Formative integrates with Canvas, PowerSchool, and other systems that support LTI

Dobes Vandermeer avatar
Written by Dobes Vandermeer
Updated over a week ago

*Update for 2023-2024 school year - We have LTI 1.3 setup available for Canvas and Schoology. If you are interested in setting up this version, please reach out to your implementation specialist or success manager.

Integrations

Formative supports an industry standard web application integration method called "Learning Tools Interoperability" (LTI).  Many educational software systems support LTI as a way to integrate different tools into a single learning platform.  LTI allows users of one of these systems to:

  1. Add a button or link to open Formative, logging in automatically (LTI Launch)

  2. Give assignments that embed / launch a Formative assessment

  3. Copy results from Formative back to the central gradebook (LTI Grade Passback)

Note that support for various LTI features varies between software packages. For example, Canvas is a major driver behind the creation and adoption of LTI and supports every feature of LTI. PowerSchool Learning supports launching and embedding a Formative assessment, but does not allow grade passback. Blackbaud onCampus supports launching a formative assessment and grade passback.

Prerequisites & Caveats

  • You must have a Gold level license for your organization

  • Teacher and student accounts must be created and associated with the Gold organization before those users can use the LTI features

  • Teacher and student accounts must all have an email address set up in both applications, and it must be the same email address in both cases

Setup / Installation

Exactly how to set up the LTI integration depends on the software you are trying to integrate Formative with (see below for instructions for Canvas, Blackbaud OnCampus, and Schoology).  Please consult the documentation for your software to fully understand the options that are available to you and which LTI features are supported.

In general there will be three main ways to add Formative to your application.  All of them require you to enable LTI within Formative for your organization and retrieve a key and secret to authorize the integration.

Recommended: Account-wide Installation

Note that because Formative associates the credentials with your entire organization, and because the credentials should not be shared widely within your organization, it is best if you are able to configure the LTI key & secret centrally for everyone rather than have it setup individually for each teacher or each course.

Accessing Credentials and Configuration in Formative

Please contact your Success Manager to obtain a link to the LTI Setup page. This enables a Formative admin-level user to enable LTI and retrieve the authorization information for organizations they are an administrator of:

Please treat the consumer secret with care; in the wrong hands, the combination of consumer key & secret can potentially be used to log into Formative as any user in your organization.  Thus this information should only be accessible to users who should have that kind of power.  It should not be sent in an email or chat message.  If you are not the person who will setup the LTI integration, grant the appropriate person admin access to the top-level organization in Formative.

Note: It is best to setup LTI for as broad a group of users as possible so that if you expand your use of Formative later you won't have to update your key & secret.  For example, if you are district administrator, configure LTI for the district.  This will avoid the need to setup a separate LTI integration for every single school. If you are currently setting up Formative for only part of your jurisdiction, you may contact us to get LTI credentials for your entire jurisdiction, to be used for LTI purposes only.

Setup Option 1: Add Formative Using The Edu App Center

Instructure maintains a directory of LTI tools for easy access.  If you are using Canvas, or another platform that uses this directory, you can find Formative there:

Clicking the formative logo takes you to the listing page:

Clicking "+ Add App" opens the credentials modal:

The Consumer Key and Shared Secret come from the Credentials you retrieved from Formative's LTI Setup page above.

Setup Option 2: Configuration By URL

If the edu apps directory is not supported by your software, the second simplest option is configuration by URL.

If your software supports this you may find a form very similar to this one:

Set the name to "Formative" and copy/paste the other fields from the matching headings in the LTI Setup page in formative.

Setup Option 3: Fully Manual Configuration

If the above fails, you may end up with a form that looks like one of these:

Exactly which fields are provided varies by application, but they should correspond roughly to the above and should be filled out as follows:

  • Name: Formative

  • Consumer Key & Consumer Secret: Copy from LTI Setup page

  • Domain / Host: app.formative.com or https://app.formative.com depending whether the field expects a full URL

  • Config URL: Copy from LTI Setup page (note that the Config URL is not the same as the Launch URL)

  • Privacy / Share Name & Email Address: Enable name & email sharing, since our integration requires the email address to identify the student and if the names are anonymized the users' existing correct names might be replaced with numbers or other placeholder text when they log in

  • Custom Fields: Leave blank

Blackbaud onCampus LTI Setup

  • Go to Core > Settings > Integration > Learning Tools

  • Add a new tool provider

  • Choose type "Other Provider"

  • Set the name to "Formative"

  • Set Status: Active

  • Set "Https Only" for all privacy settings

  • Set available on "Topics" and "Assignments"

  • Choose "By Domain" credentials type

  • Enter app.formative.com as the domain and enter the consumer key and secret you get from the LTI Setup page

  • Enable "Returns Grades"

Schoology LTI Setup

To add the LTI tool for the whole organization, go to Tools > School Management > Integration > External Tools and click "Add External Tool Provider"

Name: Formative

Consumer Key: Use the Consumer Key from the LTI Setup page

Shared Secret: Use the Consumer Secret from the LTI Setup page

Privacy: Select Name and Email/Username of user who launches

Configuration Type: Manual

Match By: Domain

Domain/URL: app.formative.com

Custom Parameters: blank

Using the LTI Integration

One configured, you can make use of the LTI features.  The details of how this is done varies greatly depending on the software you are using.  

Canvas:

Blackbaud:

Schoology:

Other systems:

Currently we do not have detailed instructions for using LTI with other systems. Please consult the documentation for your software and see if you can find similar features to the ones shown above.

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