Canvas Student View – Now on Course Home Pages

You can now skip going to your Settings menu and instead access Student View right from your course home page. A button has been added to the options in the right-hand sidebar (screenshot below). This will make it both quicker and easier for you to view your course as your students see it!

FREE Growing Online Learning conference, this week!

The annual free Growing Online Learning Conference begins tomorrow!

The theme for this year’s event is Online Assessment and Feedback. There will be six sessions specifically tailored for Illinois community colleges faculty. The Teaching and Learning Center will be hosting live broadcasts of these sessions, and all faculty are invited to drop in (no prior registration necessary). See room locations below (view print friendly version with session descriptions). This is an excellent opportunity for KCC faculty to learn how peer colleagues provide feedback and promote engagement online!

Click to enlarge this image.

5 Ways You Can Help the KCC Food Pantry

The grand opening of the KCC Food Pantry will be Wednesday, February 14th! The food pantry is located in R312 and is for KCC students.

Here’s how you can help:

• Donate those reusable bags you have hanging around your home. There are collection totes by the mailboxes in L355 and W102, or you can drop them off to Denise Caparula in L342.
• Sign up for a 15 minute shift on opening day to spread awareness.
• Donate food – a collection bin is located by the first floor information desk.
• Donate funds through the KCC Foundation – you can even do this online from the comfort of your home or office! (Be sure to enter “Food Pantry” in the Other field)
• Most importantly, tell your students about the food pantry!

The grand opening celebration will be held on Wednesday, February 14th at 2pm in Room 307 – ribbon cutting and remarks are scheduled for 2:30pm.

Learning Artifacts – Psychology

Memory is the last unit covered in Intro to Psychology, and Professor Cari Stevenson uses this as the basis for a unique semester review opportunity. All students must select a technique from the memory unit and apply it to a concept learned during the course, and they are given free reign over what they create. All of the projects are then set up around the classroom for a class review of the semester. This allows each student to express what they’ve learned through the medium they are most comfortable with, as well as presents all material from the semester in new and creative ways for the class as a whole to experience.

Here is a collage of a few of her students’ projects:

Do you have student learning artifacts you’d like to share? Here’s your chance to show off some of the great work your students are doing – contact Denise for details.

Learning Artifacts – Anatomy & Physiology I

Professor Carrie Jones has students create videos and post them in an editable content page in Canvas. Not only is this a great way for her to assess her students’ learning (it’s hard to fake it on camera!), it’s also a collaborative activity, utilizes different learning styles, and takes advantage of the available technology.

Students are given the following guidelines:

You and a partner will be assigned a bone or bones during lab this week. Using the models in lab, you will make a video pointing out the parts listed on Attachment 1 for that bone(s). Both individuals must be seen in video (taking turns pointing out parts or the videographer take a quick selfie at beginning or end of video). Your video must be posted here by the beginning of lab next week.

Be sure to include a title (which bone or bones the video covers) and your names. You can type this just above where you post the video.

Want to learn how to use editable Canvas pages?

• Find how to create a Canvas page for student editing in the guide How do I create a new page in a course? 
• Find student directions for editing a page in the guide How do I edit a course page as a student?
• Canvas Challenge completers – to jog your memory, we used an editable page in Challenge 8

Do you have student learning artifacts you’d like to share? Here’s your chance to show off some of the great work your students are doing – contact Denise for details.

What’s a Learning Artifact?

The Student Learning Committee has some big things planned for spring beginning with the January in-service, and the use of learning artifacts will figure prominently. In short, a learning artifact is something that a student produces that helps you determine how well they have learned the content they’ve studied.

Below are a small variety of artifact examples with accompanying method of assessment, all on the same topic. In coming days examples from current KCC courses will be posted.

Note: You can click on the images to view them in full size.

Embedded Test Questions, assessed with answer key

 

Demonstration/Presentation, assessed with checklist

Illustration, assessed with rubric

Do you have student learning artifacts you’d like to share? Here’s your chance to show off some of the great work your students are doing – contact Denise for details.

Screencast-O-Matic Now Integrated with Canvas

Screencast-O-Matic has long been a popular tool for creating screen recordings because of its simplicity.  There are both free and pro subscription options, but the free version happily retains most of the key functionality.

Screen recordings in Canvas are now even easier!

We’ve integrated screencast-o-matic directly into the rich content editor (RCE) bar that appears throughout Canvas.  So now you can launch this application directly while editing content pages, discussion posts, announcements, and more.  This makes it incredibly easy to create content such as:

• voice-over powerpoints and presentations
• course tours
• short lectures

The tool can be found under the ‘more external tools’ drop-down menu (V icon) in the RCE as shown below.

Contact us if you would like any help getting started with this tool.

Monthly Links – November

Happy November! Here’s a list of links to a variety of teaching and learning topics posted throughout the month of October. Read them all, read none, read one – whatever strikes your fancy!

• The greatest resources for faculty are the experiences and wisdom of other faculty, but they often aren’t fully taken advantage of when opportunities present themselves. How to Make our Conversations about Teaching More Productive offers some tips for doing just that.
• On a similar topic, The Two Kinds of Stories We Tell about Ourselves explores the impact of the inner narratives we choose. Not only can shaping those narratives differently change perspectives on classroom experiences, but this skill could also be extremely helpful for students.
• Finally some changes are coming to how the federal graduation rate is calculated that acknowledges that not all higher ed institutions are the same. The New, Improved IPEDS now includes tracking part-time and adult students, a huge constituency in community colleges.
• While it describes a lesson delivered to a very young student population, Ethics and The Giving Tree provides some food for thought as to how to broach this topic. And you can’t beat the video narrated by Shel Silverstein himself!
• I Chose Abuse, Because it Seemed Safer discusses some of the harshest realities facing students outside of the classroom.

To counteract the bleakness of that last one, here are a couple additional titles just for fun:

• Best headline goes to Friday the 13th: Flight 666 makes it safely to HEL.
• UPS Dogs is a Facebook page filled with pictures of canines UPS drivers encounter along their routes. You’re welcome.

Looking for contributors – if you come across something you think may be of value/interest to your colleagues over the next month, send the link to CanvasHelp@kcc.edu!

No More Clouds! Canvas Icon Change Coming Soon…

Your cloud-clicking days are over! This weekend the cloud publish/unpublish icons will be replaced. As a refresher, here are the current icons you see in your courses indicating whether or not an item is published:

Old Publish/Unpublish Icons

The icons are being changed to enhance visibility. Here’s a preview of the new look:

New Publish/Unpublish Icons

Bear with us* if we continue to ask you if you’ve “clicked the cloud” – it will probably take a while to break free of that habit!

*Do you have trouble remembering if the phrase is “bear with me” or “bare with me”? Here’s a fun way to make the correct version stick!

New Canvas Teacher App for iOS and Android

Canvas Teacher App

Late this July Canvas released a new app specifically built for teachers.  The Canvas Teacher app replaces the existing SpeedGrader app and allows instructors to grade, communicate, and update course content.  The interface is a marked improvement over the SpeedGrader app, and puts some of the most common functions of Canvas in a convenient mobile format.  Advanced instructor features will still require the full desktop browser experience, but this is certainly a helpful tool to have on hand as we head into the new term!

iOS Devices: Download the Canvas Teacher app in the iTunes store. Version 1.0 requires iOS 10.0 or later.

Android Devices: Download the Canvas Teacher app in the Play store. Version 1.0 requires Android 5.0 or later.