Want to become a Canvas ninja like me <wink, wink>? Here are four fast and furious little Canvas tricks that will leave you gasping for breath as you exclaim, “I did not know that!”
[Tip topics in this episode: Speedgrader comments, viewing Groups area, displaying announcements, undelete]Know any great best-kept-secret Canvas tricks? Do tell! (And maybe I'll use it in a future "I Did Not Know That" episode.)
Many students are brand new to Canvas or, even if they’ve been using it awhile, just don’t know it very well. You can decrease their floundering and frustration (and make your life easier) by giving students some basic guidance as part of your course design. In this episode, we look at four simple things you can do to keep students from getting sidelined by inexperience with Canvas.
BONUS: I created a "Canvas Tips for Students" cheatsheet you can share with your students. It's currently in a barebones, accessible Word format--I suggest you download and customize it for your class and then add it to a page in your course.
What does it mean to be a “good” citizen? While certainly not a new question, it is one that is experiencing a renaissance in many of our hearts and minds. Especially in the last few years, we have come to realize that our digital space and the way we inhabit it has the power to profoundly impact our analog world. We live so much of our lives on the digital plane that who and how we are in this space arguably begs as much reflection and intention as that of our physical lives.
In other words, there’s a (relatively) new existential angst in town.
My own anxious concern around what exactly it means to be an educator in this brave new world led me to @ONE’s Digital Citizenship course, facilitated by Aloha Sargent & James Glapa Grossklag (read James' and Aloha's thoughts about digital citizenship) Within week one, I realized I was not alone in my concerns & questions; James and Aloha encouraged us to “embrace the chaos” of the unknown and dive head first into an exploration of how we want to participate as citizens in the creation of our digital world --- while simultaneously operating within it.
Prior to taking this class, I saw digital citizenship as relatively static. I knew the definition involved ethics and how we operate online -- and that there were grave concerns about how all this was playing out in education. Frankly, I was also worried about how people were treating one another digitally and how that was translating offline.
This course challenged me to think about Digital Citizenship specifically in the context of how online education is emerging as a culture and industry. Topics considered in Digital Citizenship come with the realization that as educators, we are assuming a really critical role in learning, teaching, and modeling not only digital literacy but digital citizenry well outside our disciplines.
So for four weeks, we discussed, read, and thought about questions concerning digital presence, participatory learning, and ethics. We also explored Open Education and Open Educational Resources. As a result, my definition of digital citizenship has evolved considerably.
One of the most practical gifts of this course was the modeling of Participatory Learning - a way of teaching online that puts the learner at the center of their own learning as creator & curator; it allows for the learner to become part of the online community’s conversation in an immediate and contributory way. I’ve always been uneasy with the call and response that education - and online education in particular- could easily become, but #CCCDigCiz quickly dispelled that as we focused on ways to facilitate students developing content and creating our shared digital landscape. Harnessing the power of social media and learning to teach outside the LMS were introduced, and I quickly began to see just how far “beyond the classroom” we could take our students on this digital plane. Helping students learn to navigate the curation, evaluation, and creation rather than simply digest and respond to a prompt is an essential 21st skill set that is addressed by this course.
We were asked to think about and develop participatory and/or non-disposable assignments that addressed these skills and that we could use within our respective disciplines.
Another valuable and unexpected take away from Digital Citizenship was exposure to material sourced from Open Educational Resources, or OER. While involved in critical & ethical discussions around Open Education, we were guided to explore resources & materials that were freely available to all. What I love about OER is that many things can be adapted to suit one's needs and individual course goals; how often over the years have we wished this or that textbook could just be altered a bit and then would be a perfect fit for our needs? Depending on the licensing, OER sometimes allows for just that, which I did not know prior to taking this course.
Adopting Open Educational Resources also addresses issues of equity, and alleviates frustrations of both students and instructors in making sure everyone has the materials -- in other words, using OER levels the playing field. While these resources are somewhat still emergent, the value they offer in access and equity is inarguable.
As I finished week four of Digital Citizenship, I realized my definition of Digital Citizenship was becoming more dynamic. Good teaching leads to further inquiry, and weeks later I am still thinking about the concepts we explored and their impact on our digital as well as physical world. I also have pedagogy and materials I can use right now in my course development. In short, I feel my own digital citizenship evolving. Perhaps the best thing about Digital Citizenship is that it forces an ongoing reflection and practice -- and one that is anything but static.
As with most evolutionary mediums, learning to teach with - and within - technology is a bit like building a plane while flying it, and the topics covered in Digital Citizenship are an important chapter in this emerging flight manual.
Attributions:
“An Introduction to Open Educational Resources” by Abbey Elder is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Why remix an Open Educational Resource? by Liam Green-Hughes, licensed under CC BY 2.0 UK: England & Wales License
“Revolution - The Beatles.” VEVO, 20 Oct. 2015
Search Google News for “Facebook scandal” and you’ll get 53,600,000 hits. Well, you will, if you have the same location and browsing history as we do.
Once you learn that an algorithm determines these hits, does that impact what you ask students to research? When you require students to use TurnItIn, do you tell them what happens to their intellectual property? If you require students to use publisher courseware, do you know how publishers use the data they’re gathering? If so, then you’re asking questions that are at the core of the new @ONE course, Digital Citizenship. Admittedly, questions are more plentiful than answers.
Being part of the digital world is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve now learned … there is this beautiful space of creativity, collaboration, and empowerment – and I’d like to be part of that space!
-Ramela Abbamontian, Los Angeles Pierce College
Acknowledging the unique abilities and dispositions of our 21st century learners, we begin the course by exploring strategies for modeling digital presence and providing opportunities for students to create content and connect with a global audience. Examples of this “participatory learning” include:
Pariser's talk about Internet filter bubbles and Tufekci’s talk about digital dystopias were alarming wake-up calls to the salient forces that shape our digital life and influence our behavior.
-Gisela Garcia, University of Memphis
Significant ethical issues impact how we engage with digital platforms, and thus how we teach and learn online
In the face of such daunting issues, what can we actually do? In addition to learning about digital platforms and student privacy, we can also emphasize digital information literacy in our curriculum. A great resource is Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy text, and corresponding short videos on media literacy.
The Module discussing the prohibitive costs of textbooks really resonated with me…. The use of OER will give me the opportunity to start closing that equity gap.
-Kristie Camacho, College of the Desert
The most recent Wisconsin Hope Lab report on student hunger and homelessness finds 42% of community colleges students to be food insecure, and 46% housing insecure. In light of this, it’s no surprise that adoptions of Open Educational Resources continue.
The OER section of the course serves as a primer on finding, reviewing, and adopting OERs. Further, we see OERs as a decisive assertion of academic freedom, breaking away from conventional textbook packaging, which inextricably leads to undisclosed data harvesting by publishers.
I'm excited for my students! They'll get to "take the wheel" of learning more and more. -Colleen Harmon, Cuesta College
Expecting our students to "take the wheel" empowers them as learners and recognizes their agency as digital citizens. Combining active learning that many of us practice with the permissions of open licensing points us to the idea of Open Pedagogy. Yes, we can use openly licensed resources with while teaching, but also we can ask students to contribute and share their own knowledge and work within the world.
Examples of Open Pedagogy include:
In other words, we can engage our students transparently and humanely as co-learners--we don’t know everything about the topic, let alone about our students.
If you’d like to learn more about how digital citizenship can affect your teaching and learning, register for the next session of the @ONE class, Digital Citizenship, or join the conversation on Twitter at #CCCDigCiz.