Reading Time: 2 minutesIf your students can’t see scheduled Teams Meetings in the “Microsoft Teams meetings” Canvas navigation link, there are four ways they can access those meetings. Before we dive into those, we have two quick notes: If you have created a repeating meeting, the join link will be the same for each scheduled meeting. To ensure students get all notifications and can join meetings easily, they should download the Microsoft Teams app. Without further ado, let’s look at the different ways students can join your scheduled meetings. Through an email notification When you create a Teams meeting (or series of meetings) inside Canvas, each student who is…
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Three Tips to Start Your Semester Strong
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWelcome back! We’re about a week into the spring semester already – time flies! Across this semester, we’ll be digging deeper into Canvas features, offering tips, and sharing educational best practices as well as information shared by your colleagues. But today we’re going to pause and review a couple tips to help you start the semester strong. 1. Be aware of Canvas Announcements and use them Announcements allow you to communicate quickly and easily with your students. Sending an announcement is the best way to get in contact with your entire class in one fell swoop (and it doesn’t entail making a list of email addresses). For…
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Teams Meeting Features: Live Captions, Polls, and Attendance Report
Reading Time: 3 minutesWe’ve looked at some Teams meeting features before when we talked about screen sharing, breakout rooms, and background options. Today we’ll look at three more features inside a Teams meeting — live captions, polls, and attendance reports. Live Captions Microsoft Teams can detect what you say during a Teams meeting and present it as real-time captions at the bottom of the screen. The captions are the most accurate when one person at a time speaks slowly and clearly and is in a place with little background noise. To turn on captions, click the three dots menu in the meeting settings bar and select “Turn on live captions.” Teams will now display captions at the bottom of the window. If you…
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Teams Meetings Features: Sharing Screen, Breakout Rooms, and Background Options
Reading Time: 2 minutesWe’ve talked previously about how to create Teams Meetings from Canvas and how to join those meetings. Today we’ll look at some of the features available inside of a meeting, such as sharing your screen or dividing participants into breakout rooms. Sharing Screen Teams makes it easy to show files, apps, content from a secondary camera (like a document camera), or even your entire desktop in a meeting. In the top right corner of your meeting window, you’ll see an icon of an arrow inside a rectangle. Click that to open the share options. Here, you can choose how the content should look (e.g., whether you want to appear along with the shared…
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Microsoft Teams: How Can I Navigate Between Two Organizations?
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe’ve been talking recently about how you can use Microsoft Teams with your courses. Today, we’re going to zoom out and talk about something that will not likely affect everyone — how to use Microsoft Teams with multiple organizations (companies/groups). Overall, this is not a complex thing to do. Once you’re in a particular organization’s Teams, you can do all your tasks as normal. However, swapping between organizations can be a bit wonky in certain areas. The good news? It’s easy to swap between organizations on a mobile app! So, if you primarily use Teams on your phone or tablet and need to access multiple organizations, you can easily jump between the groups. The unfortunate news is that it’s a little more complicated if you’re using Teams on a computer. The Teams desktop app does not allow…
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Microsoft Teams and Canvas: Using a Microsoft Team with a Course
Reading Time: 4 minutesWe’ve spent the past couple weeks talking about the Microsoft Teams-Canvas integration — setting up the integration and creating meetings as well as the basics for joining and recording Teams Meetings through Canvas. Today we’re going to pivot and look at Microsoft Teams itself and how you can leverage it to use in your course. Teams allows you to have a secondary space for communication or collaboration in your course. You can create channels and assign members to them, so you could have a channel for your entire class and separate channels with only specific students assigned to them. Student groups could then use those smaller channels for group collaboration work, chatting back and forth…
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Microsoft Teams and Canvas: Joining and Recording Meetings and Uploading the Recordings to Canvas
Reading Time: 2 minutesLast week we talked about how to set up the Microsoft Teams-Canvas integration and create Teams meetings within your Canvas course. Today we’ll be looking at the next step in the process – joining and recording meetings as well as uploading the recordings to your Canvas course. Joining a meeting You can quickly and easily join a meeting from Canvas. Students will receive an email with the meeting details and invite link. They will need to use that link from the email to access the meeting. Recording a meeting Uploading a recording to your course Recordings are automatically stored in your OneDrive in a “Recordings” folder that’s…
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Microsoft Teams and Canvas: Setting up the Integration and Creating Meetings
Reading Time: 2 minutesLast week we talked briefly about the Microsoft-Canvas integrations. Today, we’ll be taking a deeper dive into one part of it — the Microsoft Teams integration. At first glance, it may seem that the Teams integration isn’t anything special. But on closer look, adding Teams to your course opens a new world of possibilities. You can host and record meetings and easily link the recordings back into your Canvas course. And you can take advantage of all the features within Teams itself — creating channels for groups to conduct small group discussions and work. The first step for using Teams with your course is turning on the integration. This will create a Team within Microsoft…
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Introducing the Microsoft-Canvas Integrations
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe’ve briefly talked about Microsoft’s partnership with Canvas, especially with the Microsoft Immersive Reader. But the relationship goes deeper than that – both Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams can be integrated with your Canvas course. The Teams integration, in particular, is an especially exciting prospect. It allows you to host and record meetings and easily link the recordings back into your Canvas course. With Teams, you can also assign channels for groups to allow for small group discussion and work. There are also opportunities for collaboration and communication. Plus, the integration of the entire Office suite means you can easily link Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents into your course. You and your students have access to…
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New Quiz Update: Access Build Page Directly from Modules
Reading Time: < 1 minuteCanvas is updating their New Quizzes to make it simpler to add or edit questions from the Modules page. Previously, you’d need to open the quiz, scroll past the quiz settings, then click “Build” to access the page for adding or editing questions. But Canvas will allow you to bypass that settings page when you access a New Quiz from a module. Now, when you click the three dots to expand the menu, you’ll see an option for “Build” just below “Edit.” Click “Build” to jump straight to the Build page! Two quick notes: Questions about this change? Reach out to Canvas support at x7905, option 1 or…