 When I think of the holiday season, I think of gift giving and I can't think of much else that I'd rather receive gifts from than the power of Canvas in my classroom. So today on this ESU 8 Wednesday webinar, I hope to share with you 12 simple gifts that Canvas can give to your students and yourself as a teacher. These may be things that you're already using and aware of or they may be new things that you haven't considered trying. And I'll try to keep them short and sweet so that you can quickly see just a few of the great gifts that Canvas has to offer. If you want to follow up on more professional learning for yourself, feel free to join this ESU 8 Canvas course on teaching with Canvas. I've tried to organize resources there that Canvas offers under topics so that you can learn at your own pace and your own time. And of course, if you ever have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at katie at esu8.org. And the first gift actually has to do with the professional learning course such as that one that you can enroll in as a student yourself. The fact that even if your instance is separate from ESU 8, some of the districts in ESU 8 have their own Canvas instance. We've now entered into a trust agreement so that all of our instances in ESU 8 should show up on your same dashboard. So for an example, when I take a look at my Canvas dashboard here, I can see not only the courses that I am a student or a teacher of on ESU 8's instance. You can see with the logo in the left-hand corner that I am on ESU 8's instance. But also courses that I'm a student or a teacher of on another instance. And when I click on that course, you can see that the instance changes. So that's pretty handy to be able to organize everything on one one place even if we're taking a course as a learner ourself in a different instance at ESU 8. The next gift of Canvas is a recent update. They've offered us which is specialized apps for various purposes. There's always been a Canvas app for mobile platforms, but it was an all-in-one app and was a little bit limited with what you could do. Now you can download the free student app and keep track of all of your course communication in one place on your mobile phone or your iPad. And as a teacher you can do grading and assignments. And pretty much everything you can do on the web version of Canvas with the Canvas teacher app. And then there's even recently released a Canvas parent app. So if you have a child in a district that uses Canvas, you can follow their grades and their work using that parent app. So check those out in the app store. Next is the ability to give feedback to students using the SpeedGrader. SpeedGrader has for a long time been one of the most popular features of Canvas, but I don't know if we take full advantage of all the feedback we can give our students when using it. Specifically being able to mark up assignments and give media comments. I'll show you an example here of what I mean as we visit a course and visit the SpeedGrader within it. We are able to, by the way, just so you know, you can hide student names so you can grade more anonymously. And you can easily use these markup tools that automatically come across your document here or your student's assignment, your student's submission. You can highlight, you can add text, you can add comments that push out to the side and you can always just annotate and just draw. Students will see all of that as you see it when they next visit their assignment. And this is a little bit better or more specific than simply adding the comment in the comment box over on the side. Another great way to save you time as an instructor and give your students even more valuable information on what they've submitted is to use the media comment button down in the bottom middle. Once you enable your camera and your microphone, you can record a quick webcam video or just a quick audio recording. And I find as a teacher, this saves me a great amount of time to just be able to talk through what I've noticed and what I've seen rather than have to type it up. Another related area of grading and giving students feedback is the use of rubrics. Rubrics are pretty powerful for valuable assessment for students and getting better results on projects from them. And they're so easy to do in Canvas, I feel that it's a gift that they've given us that we should take advantage of. I'll show you first of all what one looks like on an assignment that has already been created. And for this, you can see that this is the submission box for a video project the students would hand in. And before they even submit their project, they'll see that full rubric so they can see the required items and how many points they would score for each. As a teacher, after they've handed things in, I visit the speed grader where I can then go one at a time through the students' submissions and assign points using that rubric. You can see I can slide this divider over and view the entire rubric and then simply just click on the point categories and adjust them with the amount of points that I would like to modify. Otherwise, if I don't modify any of them, it just automatically calculates them and gives that score to the students. You can also still share feedback in traditional ways with putting on your typed comments and or media comments. But that rubric, when students view that as their score, gives them so much more information as to what they did well and what they need to do better the next time. So this is how you create a rubric. I will just go back to my dashboard and visit a course in which I'm an instructor. I'll go into that teaching with Canvas course and visit the module for monitoring and assessment. And here we'll just add a new assignment like we would do, new assignment. We'll just call this using rubrics. And you can see right away when you create a new assignment, any assignment, you have the opportunity to add a rubric to it. I can still put my basic information to the students up in this text box. And I just create the rubric down here. I add criteria and how many points I want each to be and what descriptor is underneath. It's also nice to know that you can find rubrics that have already been created across your domain in other courses. So I can see that some of those maybe more generic or general rubrics I can reuse and modify slightly if I would like to as well. So we'll go to this one and we'll just use a rubric that's already been created for required discussions. We'll use this rubric. And I can still add criterion or edit the rubric and change some of the details on the rubric. I don't have to use it completely as it was created originally. Then I update the rubric and publish the assignment and I now have back to where I showed you earlier the ability to grade with that rubric and students to see it when they submit their assignment. You may have heard of tools like Flipgrid or Recap, very popular web-based tools for collecting video submissions from students, whether it be a quick reflection or a speaking quiz where you can see students' authentic responses via video. These tools are great, but oftentimes it takes extra time on the teacher's part to set up a class and have logins or access to that app. You can do the same thing via Canvas. One way is just by creating an assignment with the submission type of a media recording. And the second way is to allow students to attach files to a discussion. So I'll show both of those here. Very simply, you create a new assignment in any course, title it, put any additional information, and then under submission type, choose online because the students are going to be submitting their assignment via the internet. Check the box for media recordings and then save and publish your assignment. When we look at this in student view now, we can see that the video reflection assignment prompts students to record or upload their media directly from their desktop or their device that they're using to access Canvas. It's very easy and it just uses their built-in camera for you to collect those videos. Now, if you want to do this as like Flipgrid where you collect everybody's student videos and then they're more displayed on a wall that everyone can see, then I would recommend using a discussion. And this is very similar to the assignment option. We'll just add a new discussion. And then in the options you can decide which are checked if you want students to be able to comment to each other with threaded replies or if they must post their own video before seeing each other's. This will basically allow the students to submit their video to this discussion using the built-in media recording tool. And we save and publish. The only thing that you might need to enable on the teacher end is under your settings for the course and all the way at the bottom where it says more options. You want to make sure that students can attach files to discussions if you're going to use the discussions option to collect video responses. Now, I do encourage you to do this because like I mentioned a minute ago, the advantages are that you can see each other. Students can see each other's more like a video sharing gallery. They can use the video record insert tool and then link to media they've already created or attach a file that they've already recorded elsewhere and share it with the rest of the class. Much like discussions, another great way to collect student responses is just via an announcement. Announcements can be a quick way to start class with a bell ringer question or end class with an exit ticket. And you'll notice that the advantages of creating it as an announcement as opposed to a discussion or assignment is that it will come up and alert the students on the top of their screen regardless of where they are at in the course. If I were to post my exit ticket here, I could put my additional info or prompt down below and then allow those students to post their own before they see everybody else's response. But then they can see each other's and comment on each other's or like each other's if you want them to as well. Another nice feature is that you can time these for a certain time. Maybe I just want it to post at the end of class, but I can have it ready ahead of time so that I know today my students will get that right just in time of when they want to see that notification across their screen. I often say that my favorite feature of Canvas is using discussions because they're so versatile. One of the ways that you can do it is with groups and grouping students in various groups so that they can utilize those discussions collaboratively in small groups. And there's two ways to create groups in Canvas. One is to go through people and the other is just to start a discussion and then assign it to groups. So I'll show you how we start in the people tab of a course to create groups that we can use for one assignment or we can use ongoing over and over throughout our course. Here I am and I can see all the students that are enrolled in my course. I'm in the everyone tab but there's another tab called groups and I can see that there's no groups yet but as I make them they will be recorded and saved in here. I can add the group set and I might call this December small groups. I can allow students to sign up for their own groups requiring them to be in the same section if necessary if you have a class that goes across multiple sections. Or I can have Canvas split the students randomly into however many groups I'd like or I can create them manually in those three groups. It can automatically assign a group leader and here you'll see that if I save Canvas thanks for a minute or two and then it randomly assigns students to each of the groups. Now those groups can be used on any assignment. So for example if I created an assignment or a discussion so I name the discussion and scroll down to the different options for the discussions just like previously mentioned. But then check the box for this is a group discussion and you'll see in the group set I can choose the December small groups that I created in people or I could create new groups. And I might this is another trick that Canvas allows you to do. I might just want to make groups of one. So these might be more like private journals private between the student and myself the teacher. And for those random groups I would split them into as many as I have students in the course or even more than that. If I'm anticipating future enrollment I might set this for for really large like 99 groups and then every student is guaranteed to be in his or her own random group. And once I hit save now their discussion only is shared between themselves and me yet we can each reply to each other. And obviously I can use it as a graded assignment if I would like to track their the amount of submissions or posts that each student has made. Then I can also attach a grade to it in the speed grader. So using discussions is great for full class and there's some really creative ways that you can use discussions in small groups as well. To get even more out of using discussions in Canvas I highly recommend this great resource contributed from the Nebraska Blend Ed project. And it's a link that just gives some great ideas for different ways to use discussions whether it be a back channel or a scavenger hunt or brainstorming. They actually mention alternate LMS sources like Schoology and even Google Classroom here and some tips for using discussions but it definitely applies to Canvas discussions all of it. So check that out when you've got some more time and you want to use discussions in new ways and take advantage of those in Canvas. Our next gift of Canvas is to be able to customize our course navigation and really help students focus on critical information. One of the new changes to Canvas recently was the fact that the home page defaults to modules and this is a great best practice. Whereas in the past we would encourage instructors to create their own home page or welcome page for the course with appropriate information. It still was extra steps and students could get lost in the navigation menu whereas now best practice tells us to organize our content into modules. Now the home button will directly take you to those modules and the ones that are published currently for students to know where they're at in the course. And you can clean up your navigation settings even more so by inside of your course going all the way down to settings. Down here and then using the navigation tab and deciding what order those course navigation items will be listed in and which ones will be hidden from students. So if students in this example don't need to see grades or the other people in the course it's just a professional development course. I might as well hide that from the menu so it doesn't even show up as an option. I could reorder these like I mentioned just by dragging and dropping and get those modules up high in the list so that they can get comfortable and used to using modules to navigate. Now when I look at this course in student view they don't see all these extra options. They just see the ones that I have left at the top of the navigation options. That's a lot cleaner and a lot more focused for students to use as they're learning throughout the course. Sometimes teachers choose to hide all of them and require students to use the clicks that they build into their course to navigate the course. And that's just another option for really catering where students are going to be in their course. While it's definitely a time saving feature of Canvas to create self grading quizzes don't limit your usage to just multiple choice type graded traditional quizzes. Instead think of Canvas quizzes as question generators. This opens up a lot of opportunities if you just think of the tool a little bit differently. In the example here you can see that students would use this quiz as a self check for their research paper. When they answer the questions they're basically just checking themselves. Did I include the appropriate works cited formatting and I can go on to each question and do that check of myself. You can then give the students 10 points for completing the quiz if you want but the progress is already there just by students using that tool. You can see if I go to a quiz here and start a new one that my options for ungraded quizzes are vast. I'll just start a new quiz and instead of a graded quiz like traditionally used to I can actually create a graded survey. A practice quiz where it wouldn't record the final grade or an ungraded survey. I can just use this to generate student ideas not have a right answer or a wrong answer marked or even tally votes if I want to. It's nice to also if there are right answers to let the students see the correct answers either immediately or at a certain time. And set up the options for the quiz to allow for more than just the traditional test taking environment. So the next time you want to use a Canvas quiz think of it as a question generator. The next gift of Canvas is using the calendar especially the scheduler feature a newer feature in Canvas. When you use your calendar you can set up appointment groups that allow students or colleagues to self select time slots that they sign up for. I'll visit my calendar using the global navigation bar and I can of course hide and show different calendars. I can easily add a calendar event an assignment to do item. I can put notes and details in that calendar and show it on the various classes that I'm the instructor of. But the appointment group feature is the last tab over here. And here is where I have all the settings for setting up those appointment slots. I would name this maybe it's small group band lessons. The location I would choose which course has access to these appointment slots. I would limit each slot to one or two or three or however many I would want to sign up for it. I can also allow students to see who signed up for particular time slots in case they want to negotiate switching times. And maybe I can only afford to let students sign up for one appointment slot or more than one or maybe that doesn't concern me. Maybe I want it to be an ongoing office hours type of experience. So here I'm going to set up time slots for tomorrow that start at 8 a.m. and go all day long 4 o'clock p.m. In each slot would be 30 minutes at a time. If I hit publish now all the people in that course have the opportunity to go to their calendar and choose one. And they can see which ones are available and which ones are filled up. Then I ask the teacher get notifications when students are assigned different time slots in my calendar. The 11th gift I'd like to share with you from Canvas is the ability to integrate with Google. If you are or were a Google classroom user you're very familiar with the benefits of assigning an assignment through Google classroom and having students automatically get their own copy of the Google document which has their name and date and time stamped automatically on it and that they can put their own answers without editing your master assignment or your master document and then sharing it back to you to be graded. That's essentially what happens all throughout or within Canvas now if you have that Google Drive integration turned on. So you may need to check with your administrator of your Canvas locally to make sure that Google Drive is turned on there in the sidebar for your courses that you're able to integrate with your Google domain and then once you have it's very easy to utilize for your students. Simply create a Google document, maybe it's an assignment with the questions or even a blank document that has some directions at the top and save it in your Google Drive and organize it so that you can find it easily. Then come to Canvas and start a new assignment. But instead of using our more traditional, we'll just call this sample Google Doc assignment. Instead of using your more traditional submission types here, go to an external tool and your external tool you can click find and should automatically let you choose Google Doc's cloud assignment from the list. Now I mentioned a minute ago that you should create your Google Doc assignment first and save it in Drive where you can find it easily and I just happened to put a few sample ones in this first folder here so that I could get to them quickly. Otherwise you're searching through all of your Drive to find the document and each of these documents is going to make that copy for the students to then complete on their own and hand in. So I'll select this one. I may choose to load it in a new tab or I may not depending on if you want them to see the rest of Canvas around the edges or not. And now I'll just go ahead and of course assign your points and everything like you normally would do. But now I'll hit save and you can see that students will see it much like this. They will view the assignment and they'll be able to even actually see the document within that window and when they click on it, they're completing it just like they would in Google. However, they don't have to do any sharing settings and you don't either. They can just type on it and they're not damaging or harming your original master document. They're putting their own answers and then when they hit submit, it automatically comes into your inbox within Canvas. This is along the same lines and this is the 12th gift I'd like to share today. The ability to embed external media within Canvas. Again, students don't have to leave Canvas to go out and use another website or tool as long as it has embed code. In my example, I'm going to share Padlet which is a great collaborative wall for students to add their ideas to. As long as that tool has embed code, it's very easy to use. It just seems scary because it's a lot of code but it's very easy to do. I'll show you here because I've got my Padlet wall already opened and I already set that up and made the settings on my Padlet wall so that anybody could post their ideas to this wall. Then over in the settings for this Padlet wall, I go to the share or embed and I notice that there's a way I can copy the code for embedding this Padlet into some other source or site. I'm just going to select all of this code, command C and then go back to my Canvas course. I'm just going to embed this on a page so I could do it on an assignment or a discussion but a page makes the most sense. I'm going to title this collaborative Padlet wall. Now, I need to switch over to the HTML editor view instead of that rich content editor. The rich content editor, remember, is where you have your normal tools but the HTML editor is where you paste your code. So command V, paste sit in and then I can save and publish this Padlet wall. Now, similar to the Google integration, they'll see a preview of that Padlet wall here or I could have had them open it in a new page but now they can interact with it too. So it's not just a screenshot of the Padlet wall and it's not just a link to go out to Padlet. I'm actually using it on the page so I can add a new idea. I can incorporate all of the tools that the external tool allows. I can add my audio voice or an attachment to this, add a picture and an image. And because this is a collaborative space, everyone else who's using this embedded media within Canvas is able to see the updates to it in real time as well. So there you have it, 12 powerful gifts that Canvas gives to you and the students in your learning environment. Canvas is truly the gift that keeps on giving and I hope that you and your entire school family are able to get some new and even better uses of Canvas out of this Wednesday webinar. Don't hesitate to contact us at ESU8 for any additional help with Canvas or anything else and truly enjoy the holiday season. Thanks so much for listening.