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Announcing a New OER – Universal Design for Learning (UDL): One Small Step
We know that learners bring a wide range of knowledge, skills, backgrounds, and experiences into the classroom. As educators, we can expect to find variability in our classroom. The USask Learning Charter lists, as one of the Educator Commitments and Responsibilities, to Strive for Excellence in Teaching. This commitment means that educators work to develop respectful and inclusive learning environments that support student learning. Honouring this commitment requires that educators co-create with students a shared space for learning in which all participants feel respected, valued, and empowered to contribute as they achieve their goals and share the gifts of their identities in relationship with one another. This approach is also part of…
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Improving Accessibility with Canvas’ Rich Content Editor
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba Small formatting changes on Canvas Pages, Assignments, Quizzes and the Syllabus page can make your course more accessible. Using the suggestions below will improve clarity, readability, and navigation for all your students. In the Rich Content Editor (RCE) menu bar, illustrated below: The drop-down menu on the Paragraph option [1] has three levels of heading choices. Using headings, rather than just enlarging the text, helps a screen reader to interpret new sections and provides consistent spacing between materials. Keep headings under 120 characters. Avoid skipping heading levels. Canvas uses Microsoft Immersive Reader for text-to-speech functionality. After inserting an image [2] click on the Accessibility Checker icon located immediately…
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Immersive Reader Enhances Accessibility in Canvas
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 Syllabus page, gives users access to a multitude of functions. Fortunately, the button appears automatically; therefore as an instructor, all you need to do is make students aware of the function and embed any text directly into the Rich Content Editor when composing a page or assignment. What can the Immersive Reader do? Read and…
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Making it Accessible: Turn on live captions in Zoom
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 turn it on is right beside the button for breakout rooms at the bottom of your computer screen in Zoom. Unfortunately, there are currently only English transcripts and you need to deliberately turn them on for each meeting. However, Audio Transcript is added to Zoom recordings using our default settings so no action is required…