Images are a delightful way to increase engagement and reinforce written content in an online course. But if not used correctly, images can be problematic. From the way you embed to the size you choose, I’ll show you how to be an image master!
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework for thinking about teaching and learning that offers flexibility in the ways students access course material, engage with it, and show what they know. UDL principles benefit all learners by building in responsiveness that can be adjusted for every learner’s strengths and needs.
Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)
UDL: A Powerful Framework (Faculty Focus)
Canvas’ new Rich Content Editor is here! Well, actually it’s been here for several months already and it will soon be the default editing tool. The new editor has an updated layout and increased functionality. Learn how to make the most of the new design. It may take a little getting used to (“Now, where did they put the accessibility checker?”) but once you do, you’ll love what you can do with it.
In my previous post, I shared how I use ConferZoom in Canvas to conduct “Live” orientation meetings with my online students. I call these meetings "
There is only one you…and you have lots of students, right? How can you use ConferZoom throughout your online course to provide the varying levels of personal attention your students need to synthesize the new concepts they encounter in your course.
Learning is variable. This means students process information at different rhythms and
Here’s are some tips to help you get started:
Once your klatch workgroup is arranged, consider these tips for a successful experience:
How are you using ConferZoom to support your students? Let us know by sharing a comment below!
Join Chelsea on a tour of this assignment in the 4-minute video above.
How might you blend research, group work, video creation, and friends and family into an empowering and equitable learning experience for your students? In the 4-minute video below, Chelsea Cohen from Laney College, will show you!
Chelsea’s students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, engage in a multi-stepped project, beautifully scaffolded into managing meaningful chunks. Each step of the way, students collaborate and increase their knowledge of a particular topic. Chelsea will demonstrate how extending discussions beyond the classroom or Canvas and into a students’ circle of family and friends can foster more diverse dialogue that situates a student as an expert. Can learning get more meaningful than this?
Accessibility tips! If you have a student in your class that uses a screen reader to navigate the web, you will need to provide an alternative to Adobe Spark Video. Also, if you have a student with a hearing impairment, have at least a few students caption their videos before sharing them with the class. To caption an Adobe Spark Video, download it from Spark, upload it into YouTube, and edit the auto-captions.
We suggest surveying your students in week one to let them know about your multimedia project plans and ask if they will need any accommodations. They'll appreciate your efforts to support them!
I am the Instructional Technologist at Cañada College and I work a lot with faculty who are motivated and excited to improve their online and hybrid courses and make them more engaging for their students. One thing that gets my faculty most excited about improving their courses is being able to make videos for their students, whether it’s a short course introduction video, a set of lecture videos, or an informal check-in video.
But I also find that video can be very intimidating for those who have not yet used it . I personally was horrified at the way my voice sounded and at the facial expressions I made while recording my very first video. So horrified, in fact, that I re-recorded it approximately 56 times and then just gave up and deleted it all together. But being able to record tutorial videos is essential for the work that I do, so I tried again and kept going. And, surprisingly, I got more and more comfortable talking to my webcam over time.
Getting more comfortable with recording yourself just comes with time and practice and a lot of patience. However, the technical side of video, which includes recording, editing, and captioning, has gotten a lot easier for me since I started using Screencast-O-Matic. I started out using the Free version, which allows you to record videos up to 15 minutes in length. Then at the beginning of 2018, we purchased a site license for the paid version and it came with some very simple, yet robust editing, captioning and uploading tools that made my video workflow so much smoother. So I’m excited to share with you my recommended recording workflow using Screencast-O-Matic. If your institution does not have a site license, educators can purchase an upgraded account for a monthly price that is about the same cost as a cup of coffee (link to: https://screencast-o-matic.com/plans#solo).
I put together a Recommended Screencast Recording Work Flow and a Recommended Face-to-Camera Recording Work Flow for faculty at my college and I made the video below to demonstrate the steps. These steps allow me to make videos quickly and relatively painlessly, but feel free to experiment with other ways of making your videos until you find what works for you.
It can be overwhelming to know how and where to start when you are ready to try making a video for the first time. Whether you are using Screencast-O-Matic to record your videos or another tool, here are my tips and areas to focus on for the different kinds of videos you may want to make.
It’s my hope that you feel a little more prepared to tackle video making if you’ve never done it before, that you learned something helpful if you’re a seasoned video maker. I encourage you to test out the free version of Screencast-O-Matic and get started with making videos. Or if you have another tool at your college or one that you’re familiar with, jump in and experiment with that. The tool you use is not as important as putting the time and energy into learning and practicing the skill of video making.
Leave a comment below, or contact me via email at hughesa@smccd.edu or on Twitter, if you have any questions. Feel free to even just share your thoughts and experience with making videos, I’d love to hear how you’re doing!
Does your online ice breaker need a refresh? Chelsea Cohen has a great idea that will get your students connected and take the edge off the start of a new course!
In the 4-minute video embedded above, she will take you on a tour of her course and show you how she blends a Canvas Discussion with an interactive Google Map to create a 2-part assignment. Her students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, drop a pin on a Google Map that designates their home town and
If you use Google Maps in your course, include a link to Google's Accessibility in Google Maps page to ensure all your students can engage with the content. And offer an alternative pathway for students to contribute their content if they experience challenges.
Let Chelsea be your guide -- click the video above and enjoy the ride!
Canvas notifications is an automatic way to stay abreast of activity in your courses as well as contributing to regular effective contact with your students. But there are a few in’s and out’s to using the notifications tool well that you and your students might be missing. Let me elucidate you!
UPDATE: Since I first created this episode, Canvas has added the ability to set course-specific notifications. Good on ya, Canvas!
Two helpful Canvas Guides to share with your students:
In November, a group of five college students representing the California Community Colleges and California State University systems participated in a virtual panel at the annual Directors of Educational Technology in California Higher Education (DET/CHE) conference. Projected on a screen in front of hundreds of educators, students shared their candid reflections and experiences with technology in teaching and learning.
I had the honor of moderating the panel with support from J.P. Bayard, Director for System-Wide Learning Technologies and Program Services at the CSU Chancellor's Office. As always, listening to student experiences inspired me and reconnected me with the reasons I do what I do. As technology plays a more expansive role in teaching and learning, we must make efforts to center what we do around the real experiences of the humans at the other end of the screen. I also find myself reflecting on the courage it took these students to volunteer to participate and be candid about their experiences. And that is also something all of us can learn from.
I hope you listen to the 30-minute recording and let the students' messages inform your practices as you start the new term ahead. Leave us a comment below and share a takeaway -- we'd love to hear from you!
Don't have 30 minutes to listen? Here are the 5 questions the students were asked and a video quick link to their responses.
Links are how your students navigate your course content. While it might seem like a picayune matter, knowing how to set links up properly will have a pretty big impact on how quickly and easily students can start interacting with all the great content in your course (and it’ll increase your Canvas Ninja factor considerably!).
NOTE: This episode was updated in January '22 to reflect the new rich content editor.
[Here's a resource with examples of good and bad descriptive link text.]In the 6 1/2 minute video below, Wendy Bass discusses the value of using weekly, informal videos in her online teaching. The videos provide students with a brief preview of the new module and a sense of who their instructor really is, promoting her social presence.
Additional resources:
Please click the play button below to listen to Don Carlisle reflect on how and why he records audio feedback in Canvas to enrich his online students' learning. Or read the transcript below provided or access the interactive transcript.
All right. Hi, everybody. My name is Don Carlisle. I teach economics at Cabrillo College, Modesto Junior College, and also recently at Santa Rosa Junior College. I wanted to take a few minutes, at least for this blog post, to talk a little bit about audio, and hence why I'm doing this as an audio blog post.
One of the things that I find that, as I talk to other instructors, especially on ... that are using Canvas, is that they're not using a lot of audio, which surprises me because I find this such a fantastic methodology of providing feedback to students and interacting with students. How I use audio specifically within Canvas as an instructor are three main areas.
The first one is, I usually give it during Discussion feedback because I use discussions in my course as a way to expand knowledge. Some instructors use discussions as kind of a way for students to connect with each other, which I do that as a large part as well, but the main ideas is we're still discussing a particular topic, which is embedded within the, what I consider kind of the lesson plan, so I try to connect it directly to what we're reading, what we're going over, and I have students do some analysis and do some other things. The feedback to me is a very important grading tool, and also a way to help students kind of move forward and understand something a little bit more about say what they're reading or watching or doing something else within that assignment.
What's great about audio is that this can be done right within the SpeedGrader within Canvas. There is video feedback, which you can do, which I'll talk about in just a second, or you can also do audio feedback. Now, one of the best thins that I actually really, really love about audio feedback is that I can get up at ... pretty early actually, before my kids get up and my family kind of gets going, and I can do some grading. I don't have to be well-dressed, my hair can be disheveled, I can be drinking a cup of coffee, I don't have to get kind of ready to then be presentable within that audio feedback. By doing so, it's very easy, and I can do that very rapidly, kind of no matter what's happening. I don't have to kind of sit down during a video feedback to get presentable and make sure that the room is in order, and the backlight is okay. There are quite a few more steps that need to be in place for video feedback or to do a video than simply doing an audio.
What's great about that ... or I should take one step back and say what's the other aspect that I use audio messages in or audio media in is also during announcements. Now, the only caveat with announcements that you always have to be careful of is that there's an accessibility issue there. One thing with audio feedback on the SpeedGrader, if I know that I have a student that needs an accessibility or has a disability in the course, then obviously I won't use audio feedback with them, I'll just use regular text-based feedback. But if I am sending a message to the class, I have to be careful, particularly if I do have, say, a deaf student in the course or somebody that's hard of hearing or doesn't have the ability to listen to an audio message, then that can be a problem. It's just a caveat there, just pay attention to those types of things and make sure that you cover that base as needed.
The other thing ... So, going back to that, what I found is that audio messages in particular can provide a fantastic connection with students. One of the things that I don't get a lot of but that is fun when we get it and I can go back and forth with the students, when they reply with an audio message back. Now, again, that's typically a fairly savvy Canvas student, somebody that's played around with Canvas and understands it, knows how to interact with it and will reply. But when that happens, it's just fantastic. It's one of those interactions where you have a quiet conversation with a student very much one-on-one, and you can go over issues back and forth, and it just creates a fantastic experience for the student and for the instructor.
The other thing I want to say is that I know students appreciate the audio feedback because I get a lot of really positive responses when I survey them. Now, in my course, I actually do like a, what I would consider, a mini-survey every week with anonymous surveys in the middle and at the end of the course. In the mini-surveys, those ... the students know or they ... that those are not anonymous, those are done directly by the students, and they talk to me kind of directly. In that sense, I still get feedback from the students, saying, "Hey, I really appreciated that audio message. Thank you very much. That really helped me understand it better," or during the anonymous surveys I get a lot of really positive feedback on the audio responses as well.
Obviously, it's never going to replace all the other types of feedback, but I just feel it's one of those venues that isn't used very well or not used enough. I really want to encourage instructors to really, really try to use that audio feedback, try to jump in there when you're doing feedback or when you're giving a reply, or you're doing grading and you want to provide some feedback to the student that may be hard to articulate in writing or may be lengthy in writing. Jump on the audio piece, kind of experiment with it. It will take you a few times to figure out the volume, what kind of microphone are you using, how does it work, how do I make sure that the level isn't too high, and that's kind of the one thing to be careful of is that, as a default, you probably want to say, "Well, I want a little less gain or volume in my recording, so that way people can turn it up as opposed to the other way around, which then can just distort everything and get kind of sideways."
That's really it. I'm not going to talk for too long here, just 'cause it can go on and on. But I just want to stress that there's some really big positives to audio feedback. Number one, the cost as far as getting ready and being ready to go and just being able to do it, is very different than video, and it's much more impactful for students and much more personable if you can do it, especially on a one-on-one basis. I think the absolute best place for that is in the SpeedGrader. So, whether or not you're grading quizzes or essays or discussions, it just is a fantastic place to provide feedback.
One other quick anecdote. During my discussions in my class, actually, the first couple of weeks, I actually take a lot of time to give audio feedback. The first week, I give nothing but audio feedback. I actually go through every single student and provide audio feedback based on their discussion. A lot of it is repetitive, a lot of it is the exact same thing, and it gets to be kind of the same old stuff. But I feel it's such an important connection with the student in doing that audio connection and have them hearing my voice and seeing my picture at least upfront and seeing all of the other videos that I have posted in my Canvas course in the beginning, but to get something a little bit different, and that is me jumping on there and saying, "Hello, Sarah. Hello, Miguel. Whatever it is. I really liked what you did here, but here's some suggestions going forward that would be even better for you to get an even higher grade." That simple connection via audio, whether it be just one minute or even 30 seconds or two minutes, which is about where I like to keep it, students really, really get a positive experience.
My big suggestion to you this week as far as my blog post is just jump out there. Really try to get a good handle on audio. Find ways to use it. Make sure you find a good microphone that you like and you're comfortable using, and really start to use audio feedback, especially during the grading times, in the SpeedGrader because it's so easy to use and I feel it's a really powerful tool.
Okay. Thanks a lot.