If your kid's school runs on Canvas, there is a real calendar feed hiding in it — a standard .ics URL, documented and supported, that works in any calendar app. Which is more than the school year PDF on the fridge can say. Once you have it, the project due Thursday sits on the same calendar as Thursday's practice, and you can see the collision coming.
Two honest caveats before you start. The feed only contains what teachers have actually published, so a quiet course looks like an empty week. And it can be loud: assignment due dates are calendar events in Canvas, so a full course load produces a lot of entries.
Open Canvas in a web browser, not the app. Sign in at your school or district's Canvas address on a computer or in a phone browser. The mobile apps (Canvas Student and Canvas Parent) do not expose the calendar feed — this one lives on the web version only.
Go to Calendar. Calendar is one of the main items in Canvas's global navigation, down the left-hand edge on a computer. It shows everything from the courses you are enrolled in or observing.
Find the Calendar Feed link. It sits toward the bottom right of the calendar page, below the mini month view and the course list. The exact wording varies slightly by school's Canvas version — look for "Calendar Feed" or a similar subscribe wording in that lower-right area.
Copy the .ics URL. Clicking it opens a small panel with a long URL ending in .ics. That address is personal to your Canvas account — it carries your courses — so treat it like a password and do not post it in a group chat.
Paste it into Schedule Caddie. Add it as a schedule in a free Schedule Caddie account and the school dates land beside every team feed and uploaded handout on one color-coded calendar. The import shows you what it found before anything is added, which matters here more than usual — see the note on assignment noise below.
Or subscribe directly in Google or Apple Calendar. The DIY route works too, since this is a standard .ics feed. In Google Calendar, on the website only: + next to "Other calendars" → From URL → paste → Add calendar. On an iPhone: Settings → Apps → Calendar → Calendar Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add Subscribed Calendar → paste → Next → Save.
The feed reflects what teachers publish, nothing more. A course where dates are handed out on paper produces an empty stretch of calendar, and a teacher who enters a term all at once produces a wall of it. Neither is a fault in the feed — it is an honest mirror of Canvas, and worth knowing before you treat it as the complete picture of your kid's school year.
The other half is volume. Assignment due dates are events in Canvas, so several courses can mean several entries a day — the kind of noise that makes a family calendar hard to read. A direct Google or Apple subscription takes the feed exactly as published, with no way to filter. Schedule Caddie shows you what came in when you import, and keeps the school feed as its own color so the rest of the week stays legible underneath it.
Paste the link into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook and it works — and for one student with a light course load that is genuinely fine. It gets awkward with two kids — two Canvas accounts means two feeds, each its own calendar — and with the volume of assignment dates, which arrive unsorted and uncolored next to games and practices with nothing distinguishing them.
Worth separating two things that both get called “the school calendar.” Canvas carries coursework — due dates, quizzes, whatever teachers schedule. The closure days, teacher in-service days, breaks, and early releases with their dismissal times usually live somewhere else entirely: the district's year calendar, published once as a PDF and rarely fed into Canvas at all.
Those are the dates that turn into childcare problems, so it is worth having both. The PDF gets uploaded rather than linked, and then the two sit on one calendar together.
Import the district year calendar here: getting your school's calendar on your phone, or specifically for no-school days and early releases.
I cannot find the Calendar Feed link
Check that you are on the web version rather than the Canvas app — the apps do not offer it. On the web it sits toward the bottom right of the Calendar page, though the wording and exact placement shift a little between Canvas versions, so scan that lower-right region rather than hunting for one precise phrase. Some districts also restrict features in their Canvas configuration; if it genuinely is not there, your school's help desk is the fastest answer.
My calendar is now wall-to-wall assignment due dates
Expected, and the most common complaint about this feed. Canvas publishes assignment deadlines as calendar events, so a full course load can produce several entries a day, which buries the things you actually needed to see. In a Google or Apple subscription there is no way to filter them — you get the feed as published. Schedule Caddie shows you what came in on import, and keeping the school feed as its own color-coded schedule at least lets you see past it at a glance.
A due date changed in Canvas but my calendar still shows the old one
That is the calendar app being slow, not the feed being wrong. Google and Apple re-check subscribed feeds on their own cycle — often 12 to 24 hours — and neither notifies you when something moves. Schedule Caddie re-checks the same feed and emails you what changed.
Half the school year is missing
The feed reflects what teachers have actually published in Canvas, which is often only the current term or unit. Dates that have not been entered yet simply are not there, and no calendar tool can conjure them. The district's published year calendar — the PDF with closure days and early releases — is a separate document, and worth importing alongside this.
Yes — it is a live URL, not a one-time export. As teachers add or move dates in Canvas, whatever you subscribed it to picks the changes up on its own schedule. The catch is timing and silence: Google and Apple refresh on a lazy cycle and never tell you something moved. Schedule Caddie re-checks it and emails you what changed.
The feed is per user — it carries the courses that account can see. A parent observer account in Canvas generally produces a feed for the students you observe, and a student login produces that student's own. Whichever account you can sign into on the web is the one to pull the link from, and if you have two kids you will end up with two feeds rather than one merged one.
No — treat it as private. That URL is tied to your account and anyone holding it can see the schedule it exposes, without signing in. If you want the other parent or a grandparent to see the dates, do not forward the Canvas link; use a share page from your family calendar instead, which shows only the schedule you chose to share.
Only if your school publishes them into Canvas, and many do not — those usually live on the district's year calendar PDF instead. That document is worth importing separately; our school calendar guide covers it, and the two sit side by side once they are on the same calendar.
A direct subscription only lives in the account that added it, so they would each need to add the feed themselves — and the Canvas URL is not something to pass around. The simpler route is one family calendar with a share link: they open it in a browser or subscribe on their own phone, no account needed.
That is the reason to put the Canvas feed somewhere other than its own separate calendar. Paste team-app links (TeamSnap, GameChanger, SportsEngine, and 20+ more), upload the paper handouts and the school year PDF, add Canvas — one color-coded calendar, with conflicts flagged when a game lands on top of something else.
Every kid, every schedule, every app — merged, color-coded, and watched for changes.
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Team apps, school calendars, and paper schedules — merged, color-coded, change-alerted.