By Racquel Biem, Educational Development Specialist, Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning When we think of increasing voice and choice in the classroom we may immediately think of choice in assignments or assessment tasks. Whereas these do increase student choice, these alone do not get to the heart of increasing student voice and seeing…
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba The Immersive Reader option in Canvas helps students access your course materials, whether they have a certain learning or medical disability, use English as an additional language – or could simply benefit from its text-to-speech function. The Immersive Reader button, at the top right-hand of Pages, Assignments, the Course Home Page, and…
The University of Saskatchewan is a leader in Canada around open educational resources (e.g. textbooks) and is moving toward wider integration of open pedagogy (students as contributors, not just consumers of knowledge). As part of this, and in the spirit of open educational practices (OEP), on February 1, 2022 we are launching a new open…
Zoom is a web conferencing tool available in Canvas. To be enabled, it has to be added to the course navigation menu. Zoom can be used to schedule lectures, group meetings or appointments. Students can join any virtual meeting directly through Canvas and can review any recorded sessions through the Zoom Meetings link. The videos…
When you have certain learning disabilities or you are studying in a language you aren’t fully fluent in, it is easy to miss important details of what your professor says. As an instructor, you can make what you say accessible for all your learners by turning on captions before your Zoom meetings. The button to…
This is the second in a short series on having challenging conversations either in your classes or individually with students. The topics covered in these posts come from the GMCTL short-course Challenging Conversations. The ideas and concepts shared in the course and these posts were contributed in large part by Dr. Rose Roberts, Roberta Campbell-Chudoba,…
This is the first in a short series on having challenging conversations either in your classes or individually with students. The topics covered in these posts come from the GMCTL short-course Challenging Conversations. The ideas and concepts shared in the course and these posts were contributed in large part by Dr. Rose Roberts, Roberta Campbell-Chudoba,…
There are 3,000 students at USask who have some form of accommodation, so there is an excellent chance that your class has a student with a disability. Ideally, we’d all design courses that are universally accessible and reduce the need for accommodations be using Universal Design for Learning. If you feel like you don’t have…
It’s been a while since I wrote a conversational blog post – in a pre-pandemic world, more of our content on this site was first-person and took the tone of a friendly colleague. In the pandemic context, our blog quickly became a knowledge base to help you get the help you needed, when you needed…
In an online remote context, virtual learning communities (VLCs) allow us to plan for: Interaction Communication Collaboration This video highlights some of the reasons we might want to develop rich VLCs in remote teaching. Below are some strategies framed from instructor competencies. Some strategies for developing interaction: Model participation and practice good nettiquette Use Discussion…