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Canvas Online Attendance
Canvas has just released an online attendance dashboard for instructors who are teaching online and who want to define attendance around students’ interactions within Canvas. You can access the online attendance dashboard through the New Analytics link either from the course navigation menu or through the course homepage. This dashboard gives instructors an at-a-glance view of which students are engaging with Canvas-based activities and on which days. Instructors can use the Weekdays dropdown menu to select their class days, so they can easily see online attendance for these days & Instructors can filter the results to show students who have met (or not met) the attendance criteria, making…
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Personalizing Feedback with Canvas Audio Visual Tools
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba As instructors and teaching assistants, we invest a great deal of time in giving feedback to students to enhance their learning and improve their performance. Giving meaningful feedback involves describing what we experience when excellence catches our attention, building on the strengths demonstrated, and guiding learners to see what excellence looks like. Students generally appreciate feedback that is specific, detailed, constructive, and encouraging – and is given within a couple of weeks of assignment submission, before they’ve moved on to other learning activities and topics. In face-to-face (F2F) courses, feedback may be explanations or questions on written work, corrections with the class after a quiz or lab, or…
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Introduction to Teaching Online
If someone asked you “How is online teaching different from face-to-face teaching?”, the first thing you might say is that face-to-face teaching involves real time interaction between students and instructors (synchronous) whereas online teaching happens through a computer, with students typically working through course content like lectures and other materials in their own time (asynchronous). In an online environment students and instructors access the course at different times and from different places; therefore, it is necessary to deliberately build in opportunities to develop a rapport with students and guide them through the course so that they are successful. There are a number of strategies that are effective in online courses that…
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Canvas Integrations Bring New Opportunities For Student Projects
Panopto and various homework systems integrate with Canvas allowing for users to access materials without any additional account create or sign-on. This integration for homework systems helps to link homework systems to the Canvas grade book and protects students from any potential risks associated with purchasing access from a publishers website. There are also new tools that instructors and students can make use of that can be accessed either directly through Canvas integrations or outside of Canvas, but using the same single-sign-on that they use to access Canvas and PAWs. Canvas doesn’t have its own blogging tool, but USask has had WordPress available for instructors and students to use for…
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You can only make a first impression once – make it a good one with your Canvas Homepage
Co-written by Toni Marchione and Ryan Banow, GMCTL Your course homepage is the first thing that students see when they log in to your Canvas course. It is their first impression of your course. As a landing page, it should be inviting, informative and easy to navigate. Canvas allows instructors to customize their homepage and choose between five different layout options: Course Activity Stream, Pages Front Page, Course Modules, Assignment List or Syllabus. It is simple to change How do I change the Course Home Page?. Course Modules is the most common option that instructors choose. If you would like to customize your homepage you must first create a page and then set it as the Front Page – How do I set a Front Page in a course? Whichever homepage layout you select you also have the option of displaying recent course…
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Create Groups for Collaborative Learning Spaces in Canvas
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba Perhaps you’d like to set up groups in your Canvas course for discussions, assignments, projects or presentations. The process creates smaller groups, as well as a space within the course for group members to collaborate, called a Group Homepage. Group creation can help our courses to be more active and social, and enable connection with the people, ideas and concepts students need to support their learning; using groups is aligned with USask’s Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles, characteristics of effective digital learning spaces, and can support skill development and learner achievement for our students. By bringing students together in smaller groups and inviting them to communicate and work…
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Elaborations on Canvas collaborations
The transition to remote learning has been in progress for almost a year now, with many instructors grabbing the Canvas bull by the horns and learning how to use the different Canvas tools to provide their students with the best learning experience possible. With what feels like the whole world working remotely right now, collaborating with peers and colleagues is a necessary skill that we can help students develop and refine. Learning to work collaboratively is important because it not only helps to prepare students for careers but it elegantly highlights that it is often easier to succeed at tasks when working in a team. Canvas gives you the ability…
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Using MEETS in Canvas
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba When we listened to students in facilitated focus groups this fall about their remote learning experiences, they said it would be helpful to have a central place to meet virtually with their instructors, eliminating the need to search for meeting links and access different platforms. Your integrated Webex room in MEETS provides a consistent and easily accessible space for hosting virtual classes, office hours, and individual student appointments. Students know where to meet and do not need a special link to join the session. However, the space serves more than just utilitarian purposes. Coming together with students in MEETS also provides what many students are hungering for…
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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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How Canvas Supports Learner-Centred Assessment
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba This post is part of a series about using Canvas to integrate the eight Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles. In this post, we look at the Inclusive of learning-centred assessment principle. Inclusive of learning-centred assessment: Learning and feedback are iterative, and assessment comes from multiple sources, including self, peers, teachers, and outside experts. Effective assessment practices follow from a learner-centred teaching approach, with practices designed to produce evidence of the kind of learning you want to measure, aligned with the learning outcomes for the course. Feedback needs to be both affirming and corrective in order for any of us to learn, and if it is unambiguous, specific, frequent, and…