[ARCHIVED] Summer Professional Development/Learning

[cdavitt]

This is our first school year using Canvas on a pretty small scale. We started the year with only 16 teachers at the high school and have grown to a little over 30. We offered some development sessions throughout the year, for example, we just held a Just One Unit session. The idea was to help those who are just starting to dabble a bit with Canvas. We met to start building just one single unit to help prevent the teacher from getting overwhelmed. The session went pretty well.

 This will be our first summer that we can offer something to help teachers get in and build for the following school year.

What have you offered for Canvas development over the summer? How do you structure that? 

I'm looking for any and all ideas to help the staff grow in a meaningful way.

[rconroy]

I'm a huge fan of PD. I know that sounds kind of silly, but if we aren't growing, we can actually grow stagnant. Have you checked out the Canvas User Engagement‌ space? There's a TON of great stuff there. I'm excited to see how others answer this from their institutions experience. 

If you're looking for a cool tool for PD in general (think practicing instructional strategies for those PD days that your staff have to keep up to date on like talking about ELL strategies for Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction) then Practice is a cool solution, too! the Practice Users Group‌ and the Guides: Practice‌ are good places to start with that. 

Hope this helps start you in a direction! 

[cdavitt]

Thank you for these ideas, I really appreciate it! I just stumbled across this idea from California. I like the little video bytes.

[rconroy]

That's super cool! Another person you could probably leverage is  @ddick  and his super cool CanvasGifs on Twitter. I've heard people use these in day to day PD and it's awesome! 

[mjoaquin]

I posted this in another thread, but hopefully it will be helpful for you as well! 

For face-to-face training I offer the following: 3 hour Getting to Know Canvas course, a 1.5 hour Canvas Next Steps, and a 1.5 hour Canvas is Elementary. The 3 hour course is basically a hands-on version of the online course mentioned below, with me there supporting them and walking them through the steps. 

I have found, and again just in my experience, many of our teachers want to be more "directly" taught how to use an LMS. I think the key is having that hands-on experience. 

With that said, I do have a fully online course that teachers can access year round. That course is badge-based, and essentially walks the learner through the steps of creating a course. The goal (hopefully!) being to lead them to creating a complete course while avoiding it becoming a file dump. So things like setting the course navigation, that may seem like after thoughts, are included early on as components of earning a badge. Here is a link to this course in Commons.

I am sharing the slide deck I used to lead my most recent 3 hour session. Anywhere it has an "I Can" slide with a checklist, we switched over to hands-on. This way, there was a mixture of the why and the how throughout the training. This may be totally off base from what you are looking for, but I know I love shared resources! (It is branded, but you can make a copy and edit as needed!) You may also be way past this point with your teachers, but I also have a course in Commons right now called Canvas Training: Meeting Everyone's Needs that has presentations for beginners and more advanced users as well as marketing materials and additional resources.

I love to talk Canvas so please reach out of you have any questions or follow up thoughts! 

[cdavitt]

Thank you for this post! It has been very helpful to me, I appreciate it!

[mjoaquin]

My pleasure  @cdavitt ‌ If you need anything else or have any questions, let me know!

[bbennett2]

Hey Colin,

I'm going to echo what others said. We're getting ready to enter year four and our PD has changed significantly over the last several years. We had a staged rollout, where expectations were raised incrementally. We came from a wild west environment, where some were using Schoology on their own, there was some Edmodo, and lots of Google Classroom. So, we had to wrangle everyone into one place.

We have an online course that teachers can work through, also earning badges along the way. We start with creating Pages and Assignments and looking at how the Calendar pulls things together. Then, we layer in Modules, Quizzes, and Discussion as extensions of those early building blocks. I push advanced users into Outcomes and Rubrics so they know what their students know and can react more fluidly to needs.

For in-person work, what I've found best is to split those topics into "supported work sessions." I would do spurts of teaching, 20 minutes or so to show best practice and ways to do things. For the beginner group, I would walk through each item in the menus (Assignment groups, scoring and submission types, etc) and answer questions as they came up. I would also use old classes as a model for participants to see how I would set things up. After the teaching, they would have time to start building things. I rotated and moved around the room, giving feedback and answering questions as needed. The pace was great and everyone had plenty of time to actually use what they were learning in the session.

It's definitely a lot to tackle, so I would say multiple opportunities with clearly defined scopes are the most important things to remember. 

[lethbri2]

We have always had success with Just the Basics and Canvas Tips and Tricks PD sessions. Sessions are never over 45 minutes. After years of providing Canvas PD in numerous formats, I can easily tell when people start to get overwhelmed, so we try and adapt to the current user needs. What do your instructors need to do (based on recommendations or policy) and what's above and beyond and might be more suited for training at a later date? 

Depending on your capacity, doing a drop-in type of support in instructor offices or office spaces can be a fun way to engage with instructors. We call it Canvas in Your Office or Canvas on the Go. During busy times, our instructors tend to travel less for help, so if we can go to them in an environment they're comfortable and already set up in, we have a lot of traffic. Having coffee helps. Stop for coffee, stay for support. You can also set a focus to give people some ideas of what they can ask about: Canvas homepages, uploading files, Gradebook Setup, etc.