Canvas Inbox
For the Canvas Inbox, I felt there just needed to be a lot of grouping of tools to icons and or dropdowns. This and some slight changes to the list showing the messages.
There is a lot of icons and functionality related options in the inbox and I felt drop downs and settings icons would help.
The problem I faced was taking my grey comps and bringing them to the surface comp level. It was hard finding ways to add color that made sense and didn't stick out in a bad way.
Overal on the desktop I wanted to clean up the header and sub-header space by putting the options they had under dropdowns or clickable icons. I also wanted to add-in some background color to the list of messages to separate them from the open message. For both desktop and mobile, I added the important message icon with the exclamation point. This gives the teacher the option to flag the message as important so the student will read it first.
On mobile, I wanted to keep the class name color coordinated. On the dashboard you can pick colors for classes, so I wanted to bring that to light in the inbox so students could see what message belongs to what classes easier.