Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs the semester continues, we want to keep exploring ways to effectively communicate with students. We’ve talked about three tips for writing clear content. And today, we’re looking at one of the areas to apply those principles – the Canvas Announcements tool. These tips below are suggestions to boost communication and support your students throughout the course. Manage your students’ expectations regularly If you want to do more than provide textual guidance, you can embed video from Kaltura. Providing a video or audio announcement adds a personal dimension that many students enjoy. Finally, you can pre-program your announcements and then delay them from posting. Keep students…
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How Can My Students Join Teams Meetings Scheduled through Canvas?
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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How Can Students Respond to my Canvas Announcements?
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe talk a lot about Canvas announcements because they’re such a convenient way to get information out to your entire class. Today, we’re looking at another aspect of announcements – how to handle a situation when you want students to easily be able to respond to what you send out and ask questions or add comments. Canvas makes this simple. When you’re creating an announcement, check the “Allow users to comment” box under the “Options” heading. Canvas will then remember that you checked the box and keep it checked in the future. If you uncheck that box to not allow users to comment, Canvas will likewise remember that and keep that setting as…
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How to Add Announcements to Your Course’s Home Page in Canvas
Reading Time: 2 minutesCommunication with your students has never been more important than it is now. With all the changes to how courses are structured and items potentially changing frequently, you want to make sure your students have the most up-to-date information and that it’s easy to find that information. We’ve talked before about using Announcements in Canvas. They’re by far the simplest way to communicate with your class – you can easily send a message to all your students that they’ll also receive by email or push notification (depending on how they’ve defined their settings), and the announcement also lives inside Canvas. But we can take this one step further and make…
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Remote Learning: The Basics
Reading Time: 3 minutesYou’ve survived the first couple days of teaching remotely because of COVID-19 – congratulations! We’re going to use this post to take a pause and review some of the methods that are most helpful for transitioning online. These are the things that will make your course functional. Your course will survive. And later in this transitioning online series, we’ll be covering items that will slowly take you from surviving to thriving. But for now, we’re starting small. If you haven’t checked out the Getting Started with Remote Learning course in Canvas, please do so. We walk through these tips plus best practices, FAQs, and ways to get…
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Save Time by Scheduling Canvas Announcements
Reading Time: 2 minutesAs you keep thinking about next semester, you may be interested in using a Canvas feature that will allow you to save some time across the semester when communicating with your students. Canvas provides an announcements feature – you can use this to quickly and easily send messages to your entire class. Announcements is an excellent place for you to touch base with your students, notify them of resources, or give updates and reminders. But did you know that you can schedule announcements? Now this won’t work for every instance (e.g., “No class Tuesday”), but you can look ahead across the semester and identify places where you know…
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Adding External Tools to Your Course
Reading Time: 3 minutesWe’ve previously talked about how to use Ensemble for screen capture and webcam recording. We’ve also talked about how to add annotations, edit, and upload your video. But once you’ve uploaded your video, how do you get it into Canvas? Ensemble is integrated with Canvas as an external tool, so it’s a simple process to add media to your course. We’re going to use Ensemble as an example here, but you’ll follow the same initial process to add any external tool to your course. Add an external tool to a module If you want your video or other item from an external tool to be available directly…