Canvas with Kindergarteners

[marie_hone]

Hello,

I have a Kindergarten teacher who is looking for the best/simplest way for her Kindergarteners to upload pictures and provide audio feedback.  All students have ipads.

Some examples of what she needs: 

1.  The students complete a puzzle/task - they take a picture of their work, then record themselves reflecting on that work.  

2.  They are given an image to draw on and then describe what they drew and why. 

She would like to include audio directions too.  

I would love to be able to show her some examples of what others are doing and how they are using Canvas with their littlest learners.  She is making the shift to Canvas from Seesaw because the district no longer uses Seesaw.

Thank you for your help in advance.

Marie

[DonLourcey]

Hey @marie_hone 

These are great suggestions for what she wants her littles to do.

In either case, the teacher could create a simple assignment where in the instructions she can post a media recording from the RCE of what she wants her littles to do, and maybe an example. Then she can set the assignment to online submission type and choose the text entry, file upload, and media recording. Her students can choose media recording and record directly from the ipads and then submit. There is also a webcam option for file upload where they can take a screen shot and upload to the assignment as well.

I hope this helps. 

Don

[DeloraIdehenre]

Canvas will also let her use the media recorder built in to record audio directions. Just switch it to audio only, but even using video directions would allow her to show them an example of what she wants them to do. Lots of possibilities. 

[bartelbrian]

During at home learning a few years ago, we stayed consistent with the rest of the district and used Canvas at the 4K level.

We worked hard to make sure it was easy to navigate with images as buttons (see homepage) and using consistent emojis with text whenever we could. Logging in was also facilitated through ClassLink quickcards, so students could easily access this page with a Chromebook.

As students became comfortable with the navigation of Canvas, teachers assigned a 'daily check-in', where students could record themselves answering a question or prompt. This was done daily for consistency. The teacher would record directions as a video, and then we had specific directions (assuming there was an adult supervising students). See "daily check-in".

Now there are more options we could utilize, including image-based quizzes, and built-in annotation of PDFs in assignments. 

While Canvas can seem intimidating for our youngest learners, we made the best of our situation and had a lot of control over the environment that we curated for these learners that worked for them best.

[BradMoser]

Great ideas have been shared. I will add a quick thought and idea. I love that she is looking into simple ways to leverage tech for her kiddos. 

1) Create an Assignment - choose ONLINE SUBMISSION type and add TEXT ENTRY, FILE UPLOAD, or MEDIA RECORDING. Student can simply click on that assignment from the Canvas Student app and choose SUBMIT and select Take Picture or upload a file if they previously took a picture. 

2) Create a Discussion - The teacher could create a GRADED DISCUSSION and the students can post replies using the multimedia or text to reply. If you select graded discussion then the teacher can leverage SpeedGrader to quickly see who posted and who hadn't posted. 

In both cases, the teacher and the student can submit video/audio or text feedback about that assignment in a chat thread that only they can view. It's like their own personal conversation with the teacher and it can be multimedia.