 Hi everyone, Katie Morrow here with ESU 8 on this week's Wednesday webinar where I hope to share with you some ideas for creating core content with Canvas. Now this brief introduction to Canvas isn't meant to be a step by step how to get started, but rather you already have access to Canvas in your classroom and now how can you use it for better teaching and learning. I'm going to share with you four kind of categories of learning goals, ideas for using Canvas announcements, discussions, assignments, and different ideas for quizzes. These were all shared from a former Canvas employee named Shara Johnson who was a classroom teacher prior to that and currently works at the ESU level and she was gracious enough to share her ideas with us to share with you. So in the category of discussions, I'll show you lots of ideas. We won't go too in-depth in how to do any of them, but as a quick overview of the possibilities, I think it should give you ideas of what you can try and reach out to me later on to dig in deeper perhaps. Also assignments, some different ideas to structure an assignment on Canvas and then how to package and deliver quizzes with some alternative uses as well. So without further ado, let's get started with those learning goals by logging into esu8.instructure.com. So here I am inside of Canvas, logged into the Canvas course we're going to be using to give a brief overview of ideas of how to create that core classroom content. Just to let you know, I am logged in in two browsers. Here in Safari, I'm logged in as a teacher, so this is my instructor account. And then when we need to see the course through the eyes of a student, I have a generic student account so you can see that it looks a little bit different here. Just to make sure everyone is clear, when you are logged in as an instructor, at any time you can go to settings and view your course as a student in order to get that student view, which is nice to know. But for the purposes of quick switching, we are going to go back and forth pretty quick between these two browsers. When we start with this course, it's already set up so that buttons help us navigate. We don't have to go into content and figure out the different modules to visit in order. We can just visit the buttons and each of these graphics then links to a different section of the course. We are going to start with announcements and announcements and discussions are very similar. And just to give you a brief overview of the potential of announcements, it's obviously to push out content and broadcast information within a quick global setting. There is a way that you can send a global announcement to the entire domain or instance of Canvas too, so your entire district. But within a course you can easily just put a title, a message. You can decide if that posting is immediate or if it's delayed and if users are allowed to read it first and then post a reply or if they can read everyone else's replies without posting their own first. Because of the ability to add replies to announcements, it's very similar to discussions, even with the liking capability where students can click that I like this post button. It seems similar to a discussion, but the main difference is that an announcement is never graded. And so even if a discussion is non-graded, it still has a trackable feature where there's a column in the grade book and you can see who has participated and who hasn't. So think about announcements as the way to broadcast information and give information out, whereas a conversation or a discussion would be more of an invitation to participate. Now that being said, there's still some great simple uses for announcements. We can use announcements to set expectations. We can send the announcement out prior to class beginning or right at the beginning, maybe schedule it for the very beginning of class and tell students what they are to expect that day. You can send reminders out to students and remind them that something is due or something is upcoming or just a gentle reminder to practice some more inside of the Canvas course. Because of the ability to delay posting, it's nice to have it come at a certain moment in time, maybe when your course is happening or during the face-to-face meeting time or maybe outside of class time. And one other additional setting that is nice to know is that you can include video and audio or multimedia files very easily. So you can record a quick video introduction to a new unit or a lesson or an activity or even just do a little bit of talking that goes with your announcement that students could listen to perhaps when you're gone and there's a substitute in the room. So a lot of really simple things that you can do with announcements on a quick level. Don't underestimate the power to celebrate student achievements or accomplishments. Just give those virtual paths on the back and or share step-by-step directions and help support the rest of the content in Canvas. Let's go ahead now though into the next section where we're going to spend most of our time, which is how to use announcements. So if we again use these navigation buttons and view our graphic that shows lots of ideas for using discussions, we're going to start with the anticipatory set. And this is to set the pace, to set the learning objectives for the day, to get people started thinking about what is the topic for our class content. Just to set the stage a little bit and this discussion could be getting to know you. It could be sharing one piece of information that you bring to class with you. A very simple discussion can be initiated and then students can participate maybe as a bell ringer perhaps. Discussions can also be ongoing. So in the student view here, we could also see how when I click on the ongoing discussions, the open-ended discussions, this might be a parking lot where students can continually refer back to and post things that they need help on or extra support. Just a general question about the course. The thing about the pinned discussions or the open-ended discussions that are ongoing is that when you make them in your course, you just put them in a different section. So here I am in discussions. You can see all the ones that have already been created in this course. And in this top section called pinned discussion, that's where that open-ended discussion lives and stays. So it's like locked into the top of the discussion section. Now you just do that by adding a new discussion. Of course your criteria is down below. These will carry through all of the different examples, whether or not replies can be threaded and somebody can reply to a reply, whether or not the user or the learner must post first before they see everybody else's responses, whether or not it's graded and has a column on the gradebook for tracking and whether or not the students can like things. We're going to talk about group discussions in a second, but if we did want to make this into a pinned discussion, it would just be ongoing. We'd save and then we move it up into that top section. So now all of our discussions are listed in the discussions tab and it should be as simple as drag and drop to get it into that right section. So ordered by recent activities how the normal discussions show up, but this ongoing help, we would just move it up into this top section and of course publish it when we want people to see it. The next way that you might choose to use discussions is as a back channel. So a back channel could happen outside of your LMS as well, but the next time you show a video or a lecture or a presentation where students are consuming a large amount of content, consider simply having a discussion opened up in the background in Canvas so the students can ask questions without stopping the lecture or the instructional video and or you could plant questions ahead of time in the discussion space and ask them to respond to them as they're listening and learning. This can scaffold the learning that's going, it also keeps students engaged. Using a back channel is a teaching practice that can get a lot of value out of it. So this is what you see, it's a behind the scenes presentation and they could post questions to each other so students could answer each other's questions, share insights. It definitely improves additional participation and deeper learning. The idea for Canvas discussions would be to facilitate a scavenger hunt type experience where students are encouraged to go out and capture an image, take a picture, especially if they're on iPads or mobile devices and then post that back as their discussion reply. In this case it would share those images with everyone else in the class because just like students can see each other's discussion replies, they can also see each other's pictures. So this example comes from an elementary math classroom where students have to look for examples of parallel lines in the classroom. Again if they're on the iPad version of Canvas it's very easy to capture an image and put it directly into that post on the laptop version. They can snap their picture and then post it as a piece of their reply. Setting these up, whether they need to post their own before they can see each other's posts or just allowing them to see other ideas before they post their own, either way is appropriate depending on your objectives. And the really great thing is that discussion becomes more ongoing as people see each other's posts and images and ideas that they found in their scavenger hunt and they're able to discuss why does this qualify, why does this not, how did you create that or how did you find that, etc. So really good uses of Canvas discussions as scavenger hunt type activities. Gallery walk is very similar in that students would each create their own learning artifact. In this example it's in the art classroom and they take a picture of their completed pottery and then post it to the Canvas discussion as an example that each other can, all the rest of the students can view and appreciate. Now as an added benefit here, this example of the gallery walk is reminding us that teachers can attach a rubric or a link to another document onto the Canvas discussion and then ask students to use a rubric to score each other's work or to give feedback. So a discussion doesn't have to be limited to simply the images, it could also include some additional peer review in this case. A vocabulary practice activity is the next example and this is one that really takes advantage of groups. Groups are not restricted just to discussions in Canvas but because we're going to talk about them for the next couple of examples, I'm going to show you that you can go out to your people tab inside of your course, in any course and you can create these groups even bigger than just your discussions and you can also create them on the fly as I'll show you soon. But here I am inside of the people tab and I would just say in my groups tab, I would make a new group and perhaps I would call this the red group. My options are to allow students to self sign up and I can also randomly have Canvas put them into three equal groups. Actually these are going to be my color groups, here we go. And then I'll create the groups manually so I'll save this group set. Now I have a new tab that's called color groups. Now I'll add a group called the red group and hit save. Another group called the blue group and hit save you can get the idea there. I now just drag my students into those groups so I want Molly and Tina to be in the blue group. Now I have two students inside of that one. I want Heidi and Jill to be in the red group and I have two students inside of that one. I can use these groups ongoing. I can use them for discussions, for assignments, for other things. I can make additional group sets or even when I'm creating a discussion on the fly, I can have Canvas create them randomly from there. So you can see here I've got a list of all my discussions. I'm going to start a new one and we'll just go ahead and call this our vocabulary practice. Because that's the activity we're going to explain how we use groups for it. Down towards the bottom of the options for the discussion, we just check the box that says this is a group discussion. And here's where we can choose those color groups as the way that these vocabulary practice is assigned. If I didn't want to use that group, I would just say new group category. I might call this vocabulary groups. And let's in this example do three random equal groups. Now this vocabulary discussion is going to be assigned to each group so that they only see each other's responses. And it kind of helps weed through when you have a whole class discussion and make it something more focused, more manageable for students to see each other's posts and reply to each other. Just so you know as well when you go to the people tab now, those vocabulary practice groups that Canvas automatically created, they will show up globally as an option for you to use in your assignments. And for students, it'll tell them you've been assigned to vocab group one or vocab group two or whatever it might be. So let's go back to the vocabulary practice example for discussions. In this example, the idea is that vocabulary terms would be posted as the discussion prompt by the teacher. And then each small group would be responsible for using one word in a sentence before the next student in their group hits reply and adds the next word in a sentence. And the trick is that each sentence should make sense in a logical order and tie together with the next or the previous. So this is a small practice activity that can be used with any subject area, any vocabulary words. Like I said, you decide the number of groups and how they're randomly created or else you manually create them ahead of time. And then students only see the people in their group and only see the sentences from their group members so that they can more easily manage making those eight sentences in this example make logical sense in order. I love that idea. I think it's an easy one that anybody could try tomorrow in their Canvas class. Brainstorming is the next discussion idea and brainstorming happens perhaps when it's just generating ideas. In this example, it's for a school dance, a prom theme. You can have students, again, like each other, you can have them reply and add ideas to each other's ideas, but just using a discussion not for a graded assignment, but just to generate ideas I think is a great practice. Following the discussion that helps us brainstorm, we have a very unique idea of using Canvas discussions for journals. Journals is something I've actually had teachers ask me about. People are right. You can go out and have students start their own blogs and that can be their journaling space, but sometimes there is a time and a place for private journals. And as the teacher, I might put up weekly journal topics or maybe Fridays are our journal days and we're documenting an ongoing project like a 20% project or a Genius Hour project. Or I want to see students' book logs and I want to see what they've read and kind of have them write a response each week. And I don't necessarily want that to be public facing on a blog. I just want it to be a private dialogue between the student and myself. So Canvas would allow you to do that if you use this one creative trick. Instead of assigning the discussion to random groups of three random groups, for example, we could just assign a discussion to as many groups as you have students. So in this class or in this course, I believe I have eight students or so. So I would create a new discussion and call this journals. And then down where it says groups, this is a group discussion, new group category. And these are going to be called journal groups, which are basically groups of one. And I would have Canvas split the students into, I can't remember how many students are enrolled. So let's just say 10, create the category. And now any time they post in this discussion, I'm going to see their posts and be able to reply to it and they're going to see it, but no one else. It also gives me a column on the grade book and the ability to track and see when students have posted to their journal and when they haven't. And if I go back to the student side now and I'm able to go ahead and go home or look at the people tab, I can see the groups that I belong to. So I can see that group of one, my journal group, should pop up here. And it shows that I'm a member of it. Oh, this one is showing all of them, but there should be the one that I'm in. Here we go down here. So I will get that option and it's just a really great way to keep those journals private, but still let Canvas do the hard work of setting things up for you. Okay, next on our agenda here is the idea of using discussions as sentence corrections vehicles or this might be your daily proofreading sentences, your math problem where you post it on the board or you post it through Canvas and as students come in, they have to make the corrections. The recommendation here is that you restrict it so the students can't see each other's answers before they post their own. And then that just gets their initial ideas, their way to solve the problem or find the error in what is on the board and post it first and then they can compare it with everybody else's. The next idea is using students to take on that workload of being the facilitator in small groups. So orally, you would tell your students which group they're in and make one designated student in each, the facilitator. They're in charge of making the initial posts and checking to make sure that all replies are addressed and that takes that load off of your shoulders. The next week you would then rotate roles. I think this is a great skill for students to practice and have some exposure to prior to them going off to higher education and we know being asked to work in those discussion groups online in environments where they may not be as comfortable and familiar. We might as well build in some opportunities for that responsibility even in high school or even younger. One idea here was having students use a discussion during a live event. This could be even happening outside of school. The example that we were given was during the recent presidential election that live results could be discussed through Canvas even while students were at home watching on their televisions. Then to have that archive of that dialogue as it happened live could lead to really rich discussions in class the next day. A traditional discussion but not is just the idea of letting students add media to their discussion posts so they could record a video response or an audio response and add it to their discussion reply or just have it be their discussion reply. We usually think of discussions as mostly typed text but they don't have to be in Canvas. Finally, the traditional practice of using an exit ticket can also happen very easily as a Canvas discussion. You just post what was your one aha moment today or you post the prompt that asks what's one question you still have about what we learned today and students quickly and easily answer that discussion with their reply and it's their ticket out the door. That is a lot of ideas for discussions. I really think that there's a lot more features there than we at first thought think to take advantage of. In the next section we're going to explore ideas for assignments. Assignments we traditionally think of as just let's do a worksheet or let's hand in something to a drop box. Right away the first example is incorporating Google Docs and encouraging students to use a collaborative document to submit their answers to or their ideas to rather than the traditional worksheet. Let's take a look at this in the student view and when we click on that first assignment to do collaboratively the Google Doc is embedded. You can click on the link here or you can see it here and now each student, different students are able to add their ideas to this KWL chart. We all have editing rights and we know that we can put the links in and we can do the sharing through Google Docs itself but considering incorporating it into Canvas that allows you to add additional information around the Google document and it also gives you the column in your grade book to track student responses. The first worksheet example here, Worksheet A is also using a Google Doc. However it's a clever way of changing the URL as the teacher when you put it into Canvas. When you go to the share button on a Google Doc and you have a long URL, let's take a look at this one in student view as well. Okay, we are in student view here so we click here. I now get that grammar worksheet but I'm forced to get a copy of it so that I'm not editing on my teacher's Google Doc. In the previous example, the KWL chart, they wanted me to edit it and this one, they don't. They want my answers on my document and my classmate's answers on his Google Doc. So what you do is when you share your Google Doc with the blue share button in the upper right hand corner you get this big long URL and the last four characters of it say edit. You type in copy COPY and then put that on Canvas and that forces the students when they click on that link to get a copy of it as their own Google Doc. They can now type their own ideas on it. They can share it back with their teacher or hand it in on that Canvas assignment. This is just a kind of a related trick that works well when integrating Google Docs with Canvas or anything for that matter. It will work even outside of Canvas too. The second example of a worksheet on Canvas is not yet in this one. The cell structure worksheet is downloaded. It's linked in the assignment and then downloaded and now the student is asked to annotate it. Annotations on the iPad on a PDF are beautiful. They're simple. The students can use their finger and annotate, put their drawings and then hit the submit button in the upper right hand corner and go right back to submitting that into Canvas for the teacher to see. On the laptop, it's not quite there yet, but we can download the PDF. We can annotate it and mark it up in whatever app will allow us to do so on our laptops and then save it to our computer locally and attach it back to that Canvas assignment. This is still yet another way to distribute information to assign content to students and then to collect it back all with the Canvas assignment. It's just worth mentioning that the annotation feature on the iPad app of the Canvas app, the iPad version, has very much been improved in the recent past. So it's worth checking out. We have another assignment example here and this one is to do a group assignment. So this is much like the group discussions. We don't have to just assign it to an individual. We can make new groups or we can submit them or assign them to the groups we've already used. So just reminding you, the other option with group assignments is that you can decide whether or not you want all the students in that group to receive the same grade or if you want them to each have their own individual grade. Much like group assignments, we can also assign peer review assignments. In this example, the students are asked to write a page or a paragraph about the science content and then down below a rubric is attached because you may have noticed on each assignment you have the ability to add a rubric and then you can also, let's edit the settings here for this assignment, then you can also assign this so that students not only have to complete the task of writing the response, but they also are required to do a peer review. I can manually assign those peer reviews so that I want certain people to review each other or I can have Canvas automatically assign them. I can tell Canvas to let them know, okay, after you post your piece of response or your piece of writing, go and review three other people's pieces of writing using the rubric that's attached and, of course, you get the tracking in the grade book to do that as well. You can decide whether or not the initial student knows who is doing that peer review or not. I would recommend the anonymity feature being turned on there and, of course, the grading details there. And the final example of maybe how you make better use of assignments in Canvas is just to remind you and your students that they can attach media to their assignment or have media be their assignment. In this example from foreign language, the students were assigned to watch the alphabet being sung in Spanish and then after that, record themselves reciting the letters A to E in Espanol. On the student end, it looks just like this. Here they see the video to watch. Now below, record and submit yourself doing the assignment so I would click submit the assignment as the student and I would be prompted to record and upload my media. Bring up my webcam. I can record my response right away. This could be a reflection, a reaction, it could be an oral reading, a fluency practice, the ability to even put voice on there as well as voice and video really can add to the robust nature of the assignments that you're distributing to your students. And so that leads us into quizzes. Now I'm going to go home and navigate us to this fourth category of how to make core content with Canvas. I want to guide you, as I'm doing so, into thinking not of quizzes as just the traditional end of the unit test or assessment, but rather start associating the word quizzes on Canvas with question generators because that's really all they are. They're a way to generate a question and then have a way to track responses. Again, there's a lot of similarities with discussions. As you'll see in this first example of Bell Work, we can put something on Canvas that students do as they enter the classroom. And in the first few minutes of class where students are transitioning, they can have a task or a question or a preview activity and they can submit their response in the form of a quiz answer. It does not have to be multiple choice. However, if it is multiple choice, they can have itself graded without you needing to spend time doing so and they have a quick self-assessment of where they're at. If it's open response, the main difference that you would need to be aware of is that only you would see their responses to their Bell Work quiz, whereas when we did it as a discussion, every student could see the responses. A practice quiz, this is just thinking of the question generator as an opportunity for students to practice over and over and over. You'll notice on this one that the teacher set it up so that they have unlimited attempts and that's what a practice quiz is. This is less about knowing an assessment or evaluation of where a student is at and it's more about giving them the opportunity to better their skills. So they're able to take the quiz over and over. You can decide if you want those questions randomly mixed up each time or not and you can even have Canvas still take a score off of it but just keep the highest score out of all of them. And all of those are in the teacher settings for Canvas as well. So just thinking of a quiz as an opportunity to practice more frequently. Worksheets. So a worksheet, even though we saw it in assignments and we saw a couple of different examples of worksheets, they can also be completed as a quiz. Just ask your worksheet questions as quiz questions. It's really just a question generator and then, if they're multiple choice, those questions will be graded for you. If they're free response, you can go back and grade those questions through the quizzes module on Canvas and assign the score that way. Surveys. Whether you want them to be anonymous or not, you're able to get a quick pulse of your class and let them evaluate things using a quiz, a question generator. Ask a question, let them respond to it, make it ungraded and you now have a survey inside of Canvas. Guided Notes is the next one. It's kind of similar to a worksheet. This might be helpful while students watch an instructional video or listen to a lecture. Kind of like a back channel. Instead of being a discussion, though, where they're interacting with each other, it's more just to keep them engaged and on task. So we would provide questions of how the video's going to talk about and then have students complete those questions as they're watching the video. Again, because a quiz can be graded and graded automatically, students can see how on target they are while they are listening to the content. The next example is using a quiz as a checklist. This would be more for not for, again, for getting a grade, but just for having a mental reminder to myself of what I need to do for a certain assignment. So let's do, in this example, I think it's a writing example. So I have stages that I have to go through in order to complete my writing assignment and then my teacher for my research paper has just provided this checklist in the form of a quiz so that when I click on this quiz and then take it, I'm actually just checking off the things that I need to make sure that I included. Did I do this? Did I do the next thing? And if I'm able to answer yes, yes, yes and check everything off, it's a great self-check and a way to keep everything in line for myself. So we'll leave this one. Common assessments is discussed in this Canvas course as a way to share assessments because quizzes can be shared across courses and even across domains and instances of Canvas. So from one institution to the next you can even share Canvas questions and entire quizzes and mix them up again and use them on perhaps an end of the semester review. There's a lot of help files and quick tutorials on how to use quiz questions in more shared environments. So this button is a reminder that we have that ability to share them. Now a scavenger hunt, similar to the scavenger hunt we did as a discussion, this one's also in a math class. This time you're capturing pictures of different geometry terms and again if they're on the iPads they're able to submit those images really quick and easily to the quiz. If they're on their laptop they would capture their pictures, and then submit them to the scavenger hunt. The difference here is they won't see each other's submissions because it's in a quiz, but you'll have that nice easy way to track each student's participation because it is tied to the gradebook. School-wide voting, a lot of schools use Canvas or their LMS or even just Google Forms to do voting types of things like Homecoming, Royalty, Student Council ideas just to generate ideas or student responses. And if you do it in the form of a quiz then you have a already tabulated score at the end. So, again it's a question generator so it doesn't have to be a scored test to use a Canvas quiz. And then finally we have the infamous exit ticket doing it in the form of a quiz. So in order to leave class today or go to lunch, just answer this question. And then you can have that be your simple one or two question exit ticket that is either self-graded or open response and then you take a look at those responses later on. So I hope that gives you hopefully multiple ideas of ways you can create some core content with Canvas. I know that this was fast and furious and we weren't able to go in depth with any of the ideas. If you are attending the ESU 8 winter workshop later this month in January 2017, I will have a session that is the same content, the same ideas where we can practice this a little more slowly and try some of them out. There's also always the great help that's available through the Canvas guides online community.canvas.lms.com There's a Fast Track series there's all kinds of different there's a YouTube channel that Canvas has put up great short videos on and then there's the step guides that are easy to read and follow if you have a specific skill you're looking to do. Sometimes these aren't helpful though if you don't know what you're looking for you don't know what you don't know and so that's why I wanted to share with you today just this menu choices of ideas If you have better ones or additional ones please share back with me so that I can share them with the rest of our teachers and if you ever have any questions or need any help don't hesitate to reach out to us at ESU 8 Thanks so much for listening and have a great rest of the week.