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Reminders
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New Announcements
"Yep, there's a tool for that!": Tech Tool Overview January 18
Prepping Winter and Spring courses? Join OAT staff on Wed., Jan. 18 from 1:00-2:30 pm as we introduce (or maybe reintroduce) you to a variety of tech tools that are available to meet your pedagogical needs, regardless of course modality.
The workshop will include brief overviews of tools in the these categories, followed by a Q&A session.
1. Recorded Lectures
- Zoom + Panopto - Hold a meeting of one with a PPT slide deck and record to the Zoom cloud. Cloud recording is automatically transferred to Panopto where it can be trimmed and the link added or embedded anywhere in Canvas.
- Panopto - Edit your lecture video to add quiz questions throughout to reinforce student understanding of content (graded or ungraded).
- VoiceThread - Build a multi-slide, multi-media lecture with voice or video commentary. Students record questions or comments on any slide or can even be allowed to add slides.
2. Collaborations
- Hypothes.is - Annotate course readings socially. Provide question prompts around specific passages to gather responses or let students highlight/annotate their own interests.
- Padlet - Create a "board" that everyone adds a virtual note to. Highly visual. Good for brainstorming or reporting results of an activity.
3. Presentations
- Discussions Plus - Students create a thread within a discussion topic that can contain text, videos, images, etc. Threads organized in a gallery view. Posts and replies can have separate due dates to track progress. Gradable in Canvas.
- Folio - Students create a repository/portfolio of assignment files to showcase their growth over the semester. Folios can receive text comments from others.
- GoReact - Students create and upload a video of their presentation and receive detailed feedback via a custom marker library.
- VoiceThread - Students build a presentation shell and add videos and images to each slide, and record audio or video comments solo or in groups. Presentations can be made available in a class "gallery" for peer feedback via voice or video.
Register for the meeting to receive automatic reminders and the meeting recording, even if you can't attend!
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Discussions Plus Workshops
The company behind Discussions Plus, a special tool in Canvas for improved discussion activities, is offering a slate of informative workshops in January. These sessions will introduce the product (officially called "Harmonize") as well as dive deeper into its features and benefits. Learn more about Discussions Plus.
» Harmonize 101: How to build engaging content, monitor and grade your assignments!
Get ready to take full advantage of Harmonize! You’ll learn how to set up, moderate, evaluate, and encourage student participation in your online course discussions.
📆 Wed, January 18th at 10am PT | Register Now >
» Harmonize 102: How to create a more social and inclusive learning environment
Learn strategies for making online discussions more inclusive so that every student has a voice. We'll cover all of the ways you can use Harmonize to encourage students of all abilities to engage with course content and each other.
📆 Fri, January 20th at 10am PT | Register Now >
» Harmonize 103: How to save time monitoring, grading, and providing substantive feedback
Learn how you can use Harmonize to streamline grading so you can focus your time on teaching and the students who need it most. We'll cover auto-grading, annotations, using Engagement Insights, and more!
📆 Fri, January 25th at 10am PT | Register Now >
If you have any questions, please contact OAT!
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Reminders
Ally Accessibility Gauges
Ally is the automated accessibility checking tool that is installed within Stan State's Canvas system. This tool makes it easy to spot accessibility issues with your course materials and ensure access for all students. There are two main purposes of the Ally tool:
- Scan every piece of content/document/image in a course and gauge its accessibility. Instructors are then guided through steps to address the accessibility issues. The severity of issues (and the lack of issues at all!) are indicated by a color-coded system of gauges.
- Provide students with alternate formats for most content, and even language translations in some cases. Alternate formats may be PDF versions of documents, spoken audio versions of documents, etc.
Gauge Colors & Access
Ally uses a small gauge icon next to each piece of content or image to represent its accessibility status. The colors correspond to those on a traffic stop light:
The gauges are only visible to instructors. Students never see the accessibility status of an item. Instead, they only see a small "download" icon next to each item that allows them to access alternative formats for the item.
More Information
Learn more about Ally and accessibility.
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Panopto Archive Protocol
Panopto requires OAT to establish an automatic archive protocol in order to manage the library of videos that are stored there. This allows the service to operate as efficiently as possible for all users. In our case, any video that has not been opened or watched in more than 24 months is moved into the archive.
Archiving takes place every week on Saturdays.
Archive ≠ Deleted
Archived videos are not deleted. "Archived" means the videos are placed into a 'storage' state and are not immediately playable, although they are still findable in searches. Archived videos are indicated as such in the search results and in other views within Panopto. Any archived video can be restored with one click if necessary by the video's owner or an administrator.
Archive Notifications
Unfortunately, at this time users are not automatically notified that any of their videos have met the criteria for being archived. Panopto has a feature request in development, but until then OAT will be glad to help track down the status of any video. Just ask!
Questions?
Contact oat@csustan.edu.
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Canvas Teacher App
It's the Modern Era™, so everything has an app, even for Canvas instructors. In addition to the app for Students, instructors can install the Teachers app to help manage courses when you're not in front of a laptop or desktop computer.
Use the Teacher app for the following situations:
- Create a course Announcement (will be pushed to students based on their account notification preferences)
- Send a message to a specific student or class (will be pushed to students based on their account notification preferences)
- View your course and/or module content
- Grade submitted assignments and discussion posts
The Canvas Instructor guides have full details on the capabilities of the app (available in the app stores for iOS and Android)
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Canvas Operational Protocols
As part of its administration of the Canvas system, OAT maintains a set of "protocols" it uses to guide the implementation of the LMS. While not official "policies", these protocols are operational in nature and represent best practices in LMS administration.
Review the protocols
Questions or comments? Contact oat@csustan.edu.
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Don't Delete Students' Work: Using Differentiated Due Dates in Canvas
One of the most common misunderstanding of any graded activity in Canvas is the Assign To field, where Due Dates and Until Dates are configured. That field allows you to specify who an activity is assigned to. By default, Canvas selects Everyone, but it's best to think of this selection as merely one possible "window", and you can have any number of differentiated windows for the activity in order to meet the submission needs of your course.
Don't Change! Do Add!
When you need to give someone a specific due date on an existing activity (perhaps as an extension), it's all too easy to change the "Everyone" in the Assign To area to just the specific student and then modify the dates. Panic usually ensues once you're done because any previous submissions to that activity suddenly seem to be deleted from Canvas!
However, all you've done by changing the "Everyone" window is to unassign the activity to everyone else. Because it's now unassigned, Canvas has no need to display anything for anyone else, even if they'd previously submitted. Without an assignment window, those student(s) aren't responsible for the activity at all, and so Canvas doesn't show those students in SpeedGrader. This is why they seem to have been deleted.
The solution is simple:
- Never change the existing Everyone field.
- Always add another window to the assignment to match the requirements for the specific student. Click the +Add button below the existing window to create a new window. From there, click in the Assign To field and select the students who will be governed by this window. You can add as many specific students as you want. Thanks to differentiated assignments, Canvas will keep the existing window in place and no submissions will go missing.
- Phew!
Questions or comments? Contact oat@csustan.edu.
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Canvas: Removing Previous Instructors from Rosters
Has your teaching assignment changed? If you are no longer listed as the instructor or a course or section in PeopleSoft, please contact oatsupport@csustan.edu and ask to be removed from the Canvas roster for the prior course. Currently, changes to the instructor-of-record field in PeopleSoft are not automatically reflected in Canvas so that any previously assigned instructors are removed from the course roster (only added). Remaining on the previous roster when courses begin means you'll receive notifications about the course, and students may also be confused about whom to contact.
Removing you from a previous course is very easy to do, but it must be requested first!
OAT and OIT have begun working on a solution to automate these removals, but there is no ETA for delivery at this time.
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2022-23 Faculty Ambassadors for Canvas
This year, OAT is again sponsoring the FAC program, which makes experienced Canvas instructors available to each college, as a supplement to OAT staff. Instructors may find it more helpful to work with other instructors in their general discipline on questions related to Canvas, and are encouraged to contact these individuals.
2022-23 Ambassadors
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Accessible PDFs
Supercharge accessibility scores for your Canvas courses!
Now that the Fall semester is rapidly approaching, now is the perfect time to have our Document Remediation team make your PDF files accessible.
- Were your PDFs created by scanning printed pages?
- Is the image quality of your PDFs less than ideal? (e.g., skewed pages, handwritten notes)
- Is the PDF your only copy of the content?
If your answer is yes to any of the above questions, the PDFs are a perfect fit to submit to our Document Remediation team.
- Submit a document remediation work order: Select "Accessibility Work Request" in the Request Type drop-down menu, and "Make my document accessible for me" in the Service Type section
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