DEU | Online Teaching & Edtech ideas
Instructional design ideas, online teaching tools, and best practices for learning from the USask Distance Education Unit
Both the Canvas Assignments tool and the Canvas Quiz tool can be used for replicating a “take-home” style of exam, or a written exam, in an online or remote course setting. This post will discuss how to decide if this is the right approach for your course, how to set it up in Canvas, and some details for administering it to ensure a smooth launch come exam time. Continue reading “Administering Written Exams via Canvas”
During synchronous online teaching sessions, there are many reasons why you may wish to draw or sketch out an idea with students visually, or use a “digital whiteboard” tool to collaborate and organize thoughts during brainstorming or live discussions. You might want your class as a whole, or smaller groups within it, to build meaning with complex ideas by creating mind maps or other visual organizers. You might want students to share ideas, or media from around the web, on a collaborative bulletin board filled with “sticky notes” and hyperlinks. You also may just find it easier to communicate certain ideas, or guide students through a process, by drawing something out “by hand” — an approach that mimics many tried-and-true teaching approaches based on chalkboards in the classroom.
In this post, I’ll cover a number of digital whiteboard, drawing, or sketching tools that you might consider incorporating into your next synchronous teaching session.
Continue reading “Drawing and Whiteboarding Tools for Synchronous Online Teaching”
Back in April of 2021 we showed you how to use your phone as a document camera in Webex. Now that the University has moved our video conferencing software to Zoom we thought we’d revisit this topic and show you a few ways that you can get a DIY document camera setup for synchronous and asynchronous use. Continue reading “DIY Document Cameras”
The Chat tool in Canvas is a very simple and low-bandwidth real-time communication option that, if used deliberately, could provide a quick and easy-to-access way to aid communication in your class, improve your presence as an online instructor, or be a convenient way to structure engaging learning activities in your blended course.
This post will include a brief overview of the Chat tool, and cover a few ideas for incorporating it into your online or blended teaching plans.