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Poll Everywhere: PowerPoint Add-in Update
We’re happy to share that Poll Everywhere recently released an update to the PowerPoint Add-in. After local testing, the update was installed across campus on November 13. This update solves a significant barrier to using Poll Everywhere on our classroom PCs. Prior to this update, it was common for the Poll Everywhere log in button in PowerPoint to be unresponsive (i.e., instructors would click Log in and oftentimes nothing would happen). This issue was very frustrating for instructors getting their slideshow and other media ready in the rapid 10 minutes between classes. After this update, the Log in button responds immediately. Once logged in, you’re ready to run Poll Everywhere…
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How do you know when you need Experiential Learning?
Summary: Identify when your teaching can benefit from experiential learning to boost student engagement with practical, real-world applications. Date of Publishing: September 22, 2022 Experiential learning (EL) is not a new approach to teaching, but in recent years has become increasingly common in higher education. It is an engaging approach to teaching and learning that can be extremely beneficial for students, especially as they start their careers. Due to practical limitations, EL can’t always be used, which leads to the question: when should you use EL? Situation 1: When students are learning a skill that is important in the real world Some skills taught in university courses are critical for…
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Turn Pre-Class Readings into Social Learning
When we design courses, we carefully choose readings or videos for students to review before coming to class. We then plan for the fantastic discussions and activities that will occur in class. All too often, when we arrive in class, we quickly realize that most of the students have not engaged with the pre-class materials in any meaningful way. This forces us to shift our plans and leaves us discouraged. Perusall is a tool in the USask Learning Technology Ecosystem that is specifically designed to get students meaningfully engaging with the pre-class materials. It is what is known as a social annotation tool. It transforms pre-class readings and videos into…
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Using Oral Assessments to Collect Evidence of Learning
Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wearing-blue-top-beside-table-1181712/ Summary: Boost learning engagement with oral assessments! Discover how this dynamic approach can provide richer evidence of student understanding and mastery. Date of publishing: March 30, 2021 Oral assessments can serve as a great method to collect another type of evidence of student learning. It typically consists of a time-limited interview with a student to verbally confirm to what degree they’ve met one or more course outcomes through a series of questions and prompts to guide the conversation. Collecting assessment evidence this way can be especially helpful while teaching remotely. Please review this video to learn more about this assessment strategy. Additional Resources…
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Let Students Choose their Breakout Session and More – Now in WebEx!
USask’s version of WebEx recently updated with a few new features worth highlighting. Students can now choose which Breakout Session to join On certain devices WebEx, can now recognize hand gestures, including hand raising Students can now choose which Breakout Session to join This feature opens up new pedagogical opportunities in class sessions. There are a few obvious examples that come to mind: use this to help students form groups for class activities. Create a session for each potential topic and then allow students to self-enrol in the session for the topic of their choosing you could lead an activity where students choose a position in an argument. For example,…
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What can I do using the Canvas mobile app?
The Canvas Teacher mobile app provides quick access to grading, communicating, and updating your course. It delivers added convenience with day-to-day tasks once your core course structure is set up. That’s the philosophy behind the app and it helps us meet the USask Learning Technology Ecosystem Principle of our courses being efficient and easy to use (get the app here: Apple iOS, Android). What typical course tasks work well on the app? Communicating with students (Inbox and announcements) Reading and replying to full-class discussions Editing assignment and quiz details, including due dates Editing pages Providing annotations; text, audio, or video comments; and grades on assignments This works especially well if…
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Elevate Your Course Projects using Riipen
USask faculty members have been taking advantage of our new partnership with the Riipen project-based learning platform. Riipen provides an all-in-one platform for connecting, communicating, sharing documents, and managing deadlines between stakeholders (instructors, students, and community/industry partners). This post highlights the experiences within two USask courses. Course within College of Agriculture and Bioresources Within the College of Agriculture and Bioresources, faculty member Dr. Sabine Liebenehm, wanted her upper-year Agricultural Economics students to be able to complete a business analysis on a real company and provide a report and an executive presentation. She worked with Riipen to onboard two local companies and connect them to the groups of students within the…
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Posting Feedback and Grades in Canvas
Once students start completing quizzes and assignments in your course, you may start wondering how students access this feedback. You may also be wondering if you need to do anything to release the feedback. You may also be wondering, to be frank, about a lot of things. Grade Posting Policy for an Individual Assignment By default, feedback, comments, and grades in Canvas are automatically shared with students as soon as they are generated. This means that as soon as you grade an individual student’s submission, these details will become visible to them. Students may even receive an email notification about this, depending on their notification settings. If you want to…
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Exploring the Many Ways of Using Canvas Classic Quizzes
Quizzes are an extremely flexible tool that can be used to support many stages of learning. For example, quizzes can be used to pre-assess (prior to learning), provide practice and feedback (during learning), or as post-assessment (after learning). Experimenting with these various methods can assist you in finding ways of making your course more supportive of our USask Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles (e.g., “Designed for Reflection and Growth”). Here are some approaches to using quizzes that you may want to consider: Using the same quiz at a different stage in learning Using a quiz prior to learning and after learning can help make learning visible to students. Allow multiple attempts…
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Students Finished Writing my Canvas Classic Quiz: Now What?
Once your quiz or test availability period ends, there are a number of tasks that you might want to complete, such as reviewing how the entire class performed, reviewing an individual student’s quiz, and manually grade questions. This post and video will outline these different tasks and how you can accomplish them when using Canvas Classic Quizzes. Reviewing the class’s responses As an instructor, one reason to use quizzes is in order to identify areas where students are doing well and where they need further support. The most efficient way to view question-by-question results in Canvas is to navigate to the quiz via Assignments or Quizzes. Click on the quiz…