• Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools,  Teaching & Learning

    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…

  • Canvas,  Educational Tools

    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…

  • Teaching & Learning

    Prayer: A Great Place to Start

    Reading Time: 2 minutesIt feels like fall today. In Cedarville and much of the surrounding area, it is raining and there is a dull grey blue glow in the sky. Some may think it’s a perfect day for a hot bowl of soup or a hot beverage infused with pumpkin spice. For others it may provide a more somber or bleak outlook because of difficult circumstances in which they find themselves. For teachers this may represent the start of the year with the disruptive effects of COVID-19. COVID-19 disrupted the start of the school year making normal teacher/student relationships more of a challenge—especially for new students and faculty. Even though…

  • Canvas,  Teaching & Learning

    Adjusting to the Unknown – Reminders You’re Not Alone

    Reading Time: 2 minutesWith the adjustments and on-the-fly tweaks that have needed to be made over the past week, there’s no doubt that things are a bit hectic at the moment. And in times of great change, stress, and uncertainty, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Because of that, we’re not going to do any kind of deep dive into Canvas features or look ahead to shiny new tools on the horizon. We’re going to stand alongside you and remind you of the resources and groups here to help and support.   Flexible Learning at CU Course  The Flexible Learning at CU course covers a lot of the basics for tweaking your course to fit…

  • Educational Theories,  Teaching & Learning

    Introducing Servant Teaching

    Reading Time: 3 minutesLast year, we talked about Servant Teaching through a series of blogs posts, and we’re revisiting that concept today. For a bit of context: Servant Teaching’s more popular cousin Servant Leadership was first developed by Robert Greenleaf. In it, Greenleaf established ten characteristics of being a servant leader:  Servant Leadership is a mainstay of most Christian organizations, including Cedarville University, as a way of modeling Philippians 2:3-8:   “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though…

  • Educational Theories,  Teaching & Learning

    Servant Teaching: Listening and Learning

    Reading Time: 2 minutesI was so grateful to have the opportunity to teach a face-to-face section of the ITM-2100 Database Management course this semester. When I was assigned to this class earlier this year, I thought that the pandemic would be gone by then. However, this was not the case. Thanks to Dr. John Delano, who designed the course to be hybrid and flexible so I could adjust the course for this semester quickly. But the challenge continued …  This semester I had 24 students in the class. Students were from a variety of majors—accounting, economics, finance, IT management, etc. During the first couple of weeks, the class focused on the SQL query which is fundamental for data processing and management. I received many questions from the students and noticed two major problems: “Am I…

  • Educational Theories,  Teaching & Learning

    Four Practical Steps for Servant Teaching

    Reading Time: 3 minutesI don’t know about the rest of you, but this semester feels different. It’s either the weather or because it’s a leap year…  Oh wait! It’s because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Right. The overcast on the skies of our lives.  As part of my duties as an instructional designer at CTL, I teach a course during the academic year. This semester, I taught a face-to-face section of ENG-1400. Much like you, I began my semester with a bit of apprehension; I had a plan for face-to-face and hyflex. We would meet one day a week and then supplement the other day with online discussion, videos, and other activities. But after a…