The end of the school year is in sight, we can almost see it, just beyond that final assessment period!  Amidst the current context of COVID-19, where we are utilising online tools to enable teaching and learning more than ever,  we may need to take a different route to get there to the one we had planned.

Many teachers have now moved to teaching entirely online with the current COVID-19 situation. We've already discussed the idea of "Maintaining a Connection of the Classroom". What about our teachers who are on a rapid learning curve in the use of technology for distance learning. This article aims to cover ideas on maintaining and promoting a collaborative connection between teachers when working remotely.

Ok this is a really short post but might be helpful for some of you who have multiple adults and/or kids all doing Zoom meetings in the house and you keep hearing and being distracted by all of the other conversations. 

Turn on some White Noise

White noise is basically any sort of non-specific sound.  The idea is that you don't notice it much, but it helps drown out other noises coming from your housemates who are also in meetings (or playing FortNite with friends).  If you don't have a White Noise device there are a ton of apps for iOS and Android, and if you have a smart speaker try just yelling out "Alexa, play some white noise", or "Hey Google, play some white noise".  If you accidentally say "Play some white snake, well that might be a little more distracting.  Amazon has a whole selection of devices you can order and bathroom fans also can do the trick. 

I didn't do this, but in my house both of our Echo Dots are currently playing White Noise as well as fans running in both bathrooms. 

I guess I must be too loud?  

#KeepTeaching

The Rickster

Earlier today, Phil Hill said in a blog post that as teachers respond to mass school closures the initial phase we are seeing is a lot of people wanting to move from synchronous face to face education to synchronous online video conferencing.  Phil theorized that as people begin to become aware of some of the inequalities of relying on video conferencing technology that requires all students to have “high speed internet,” and as teachers become more familiar with the online environment, a second main phase will focus more on asynchronous content delivery. 

If you are familiar with finding good content online, and adding it to your Canvas course, where do you go to find it?  Canvas Commons is a global online learning object repository (LOR) with content shared by Canvas users from around the world, designed to let you copy content directly from Commons into your Canvas course.  Not all institutions elect to link their instances of Canvas to Commons but it is available in Free-for-Teacher Canvas.

Another place instructors frequently turn to find materials for their courses is the world of Open Educational Resources.  OER Commons  is one example of public digital library of open educational resources.  Educause also has an excellent listing of other OER repositories.  Lumen has an amazing resource site as well. 

There are many educationally focused video resource collections to choose from, including Khan Academy (which has a whole section dedicated to homeschooling), or Teachertube.

If you know your way around instructional design and course building where do you typically go to find good course content?

So the classroom is a space where students can interact socially in a comfortable and predictable way. Situations such as with the Covid-19 virus arise and our learning platforms go some way to enable us to maintain teaching and learning outside of the traditional brick buildings we are used to. The aim of this blog is to cover some key questions that appear when a situation has arisen that requires students to interact in the platform in ways they may be unaccustomed to. Although this blog has been brought about by the current issues, the topics ring true to everyday teaching aiming to connect the learning within the classroom to that outside.

Questions

1. How do I maintain the social connectedness of the classroom and maintain visible teacher presence?
2. How do I ensure students understanding of learning tasks given?
3. How do I assess and clarify the understanding of students in terms of knowledge?

We'll cover this by looking at some of the tools available to us and consider simple methods of using them. I'm hoping to cover the questions raised above from a high level.

Conferences

The obvious way to maintain visibility and engage with the class is to host your scheduled class in a conference. Various web conferencing tools can integrate with Canvas through LTI. As standard, you can use Big Blue Button to create a conference within your course. Consider that the conferences include the following tools to promote engagement in the virtual classroom.

• Webcams to give the personal touch.
• Chat allowing you to field questions at the whole group or for an individual student. It could also be used as a Q+A whilst students are working on other Canvas activities.
• Break Out Rooms can be used for smaller group activities and discussions.
• Polls can be created on the fly to assess understanding of particular concepts or you can use them for students to respond to questions you have embedded in your uploaded presentation.
• Multi-User White Board includes annotation tools for illustrating ideas and explaining processes.

Simple navigation to the online classroom is also important. Make sure the 'Conferences' link is visible in your course navigation. You can also create calendar events for your sessions. Naming your conference is important and it is a good idea to add the date and time into the title if running as a one-off lesson. 

It's also good to note that conferences will open up in a new tab allowing your students to complete other activities in your Canvas course whilst taking part in your virtual classroom.

Discussions

A fantastic way to get students working with each other and sharing ideas but they can be used for more than simply asking for an opinion. Discussions can be used for group work solving real-world or multi-stage problems. They can be used for students to present videos of themselves and receive feedback.

If you're using this asynchronously consider the clarity of your instructions and expectations. Additional clarification of the task can be given by recording audio or video instructions through the rich content editor. This feature can also be used by students to verbally participate in the discussion.

You can also use standard text to reinforce participation across all your course discussions.

"Once you've crafted and posted your response, read the responses of your classmates. For at least two other posts, give constructive feedback and ask relevant questions."

It's worth putting the resources into the discussion using the Rich Content Editor so the students can review them whilst formulating and crafting their responses. As a teacher also consider your engagement in these discussions. What clarifying questions can you ask? Which other posts can you guide students to?

Assignments

You've probably used Canvas already for the submission of written tasks. When we're lacking the opportunity to sit down with the student and talk we can use assignment tools to assess understanding with students presenting to us in a variety of ways. These can also be assigned to individual students or groups of students to allow the personalised learning opportunities you would normally deliver in the classroom. 

Using the text entry online submission will give students the option to present ideas and work in a variety of ways. They can include text, files and media all within the same submission. This gives opportunities to assess verbal skills along with written skills.

Group and Peer Review assignments can also be used to create the social interactions between your students whilst they are not physically together. 

Collaborations and Group Work

Group spaces allow students to create their own discussions, collaborations and share files. Collaborations can be created using your institution's tools such as Google and O365. A simple idea would be to collaborate on a presentation that can be delivered in a virtual classroom using Big Blue Button.

Feedback

Within the classroom, we have the opportunity to create a dialogue of feedback with the student. We can see each other's facial expressions such as the smile of recognition or the raised eyebrow when we don't truly understand.  Using the Canvas Speedgrader you could consider the format you provide your feedback in. 

The assignment comments field allows you to provide audio and video feedback to your students helping to improve the comprehension of the feedback being delivered. Students also have the opportunity to respond to this feedback.

Analytics

When you can't walk around the classroom or lecture theatre, and monitor what's students are doing, how do we monitor engagement? New Analytics allows you to view the activity report of your students. You are also able to send messages directly from the analytics view based on engagement criteria. For example, messages can be sent to students who have not viewed a specific learning resource.

Additional Resources

If you are looking for more ideas I've included this video from Kona Jones. 

Energize Your Class With Student-Centered Course Design

We'd love to hear any specific examples you have around maintaining social connectedness whilst teaching online and also any feedback or questions you have around the ideas above. 

• Background
• Authentication Workflow
• Prerequisites
• ConfiguringTrusted Canvas Instancein Canvas
• Additional Reading

Background

A Canvas Trust needs to be established between two different Canvas instances. An explanation of Trusts can be found here. The benefit of a Trusted Canvas Instance authentication provider enables the ability for a user to log in on the Canvas instance they are provisioned on and be redirected back to the other trusted Canvas instance where the course is located. This is great for self-enrollment and Catalog scenarios.

Authentication Workflow

Prerequisites

• A Canvas Trust needs to be established between two different Canvas instances
• Only a Canvas Site Admin user can establish a Trust: Please talk with your Customer Success Manager (CSM) for further discussions on creating a trust relationship between schools 

Configuring Trusted Canvas Instance in Canvas

Configuring a Trusted Canvas Instance in Canvas to work together involves the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Authentication section of your Canvas instance, located in the Admin Navigation menu

2. In the dropdown menu of Add an identity provider to this account: select Trusted Canvas Instance

This will only appear once a Trust is established

3. Select the trusted Canvas instance from the dropdown, click Save

4. Use the direct authentication provider URL to login with the trusted Canvas instance. The provider URL will be .../login/trust (ex: school2.instructure.com/login/trust)

Additional Reading

Trust Account User Roles and Expectations:  Trust Account User Roles and Expectations - Instructure Community

In our instance of Canvas we include all of the course modules as buttons on the course homepage. We wanted to make this buttons a little bit more accessible so I wrote some JS which scrolls to the module when they click the button and collapses all of the other modules. This makes navigating to the specific module just that little bit easier for the user. See the gif below for an example:

To use this, include the JS file in your current JS (you may need to remove the first and last lines of code).

Important: For this to work, you need to set up the button in a specific way:

1. In edit mode on the homepage click the button (we use images for ease of use)
2. On the right click links then open the modules drop down
3. Click the respective module
4. Click save!

And you're all done! Feel free to drop any bugs or edits below in the comments

Canvas Community y comunidad española,

There are many one-sheet guides out there, but just in case if you were looking for a single-sheet (dual sided) instructional PDF on Canvas...

Attached are the same guides in English and in Spanish. 

Example in English

Ejemplo en español

Profesores de español, agradecería su ayuda si mi traducción y la de Google están desactivadas. 🙂

The PDFs are editable. The branding and specified Canvas URL are the only edits you will need to make in Adobe Acrobat DC Pro or another PDF editing tool.

Hope they help!

-Jason

Community team ( @scottdennis ‌ et al.) - I wasn't sure where else to tag or post this Doc page.