Category: Remote

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Using Announcements in Your Online Course

Course announcements are one of the simplest and most effective ways to communicate with your class, whether you are teaching an entirely online, in-person, or a hybrid course. Particularly for online asynchronous learners, announcements offer a primary channel for regular information to be passed on from the instructor, and a significant tool for building a sense of instructor presence. In this blog post, I’ll cover some reasons you might send an announcement, a few good practices to keep in mind, and some options and tips particular to using the Announcements tool in Canvas.

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Administering Written Exams via Canvas

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”

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Drawing and Whiteboarding Tools for Synchronous Online Teaching

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.

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