Tag Archives: communication

Creating a “Welcome to my Course” Video in Canvas

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Overview:  When a “Welcome to my Course” video is the first thing the students see upon entering your course, it creates a positive first impression, builds rapport and establishes credibility.  Even better, from start to finish, creating a welcome video takes less than an hour!

Where to begin: Some Instructors use a short (2-4 slides) presentation, some simply talk into the camera.  Either way, it’s a good idea to outline what you’ll say.  Commonly used talking points include: 1) Brief Course Overview, 2) Where to find things in your Canvas course, 3) Grading and Attendance policies, 4) “About Me” with short bio.

Task Overview: You will need to enable Panopto in your Canvas Course, install the Panopto application to your computer, create your recording, upload it to Canvas and place it on your home page.  (To view the complete listing of available Panopto tutorials, click here).

Here’s how to do it:

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Scheduling Office Hours and Student Appointments

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Calendar imageScheduling appointments to meet with individual students can now be managed through Canvas. This removes the frustrating administrative burden of managing multiple places (calendar, daily planner, email, hand-scribbled notes from class) where you track your student meetings to discuss that paper or project.
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Communicating with Your Students in Canvas

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inbox

Sending email messages to your students

Canvas has a Conversations system that allows you to message students.  Students receive notifications of those messages based on their notification preferences.  By default, everyone’s notification of a new conversation message is via their St. Edward’s email.  To open Conversations, click on the “Inbox” link in the upper right corner, next to your name.

115 – Conversations Overview from Canvas LMS on Vimeo.

Students can choose whether or not they want to receive e-mails notifications of the Message/Conversation sent to them in Canvas.  They could, potentially, choose not to receive any e-mails at all and receive all communications via text message, for example.  Also, users can choose the frequency of those e-mails, text messages, etc. (Right away, Daily, Weekly, Not at all).

  • If your course is not published, students will not receive a notification of an announcement or any other messages from Canvas.
  • Students who have not accepted their course invitations will not receive any notifications from Canvas.
  • Even if the course is published and students have accepted their course invitations, they will only receive notifications according to how they have set their notification preferences in their personal settings.

All Canvas Messages are stored in Canvas so they are part of the course record. Below are links to helpful Canvas resources on using the Conversation system.

Announcements

Instructors can send out announcements to their class via the Announcements tool. Students will be notified according to their notification preferences.

By default students can comment on Announcements, just as they can in a discussion.  Once you have created an Announcement, you can close the Announcement to comments, by clicking on the gear icon to the right of the Edit button.

How to make an announcement: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-1807

519 – Announcements Overview from Canvas LMS on Vimeo.

Collaborative Student Assignments Outside the Classroom

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On Wednesday, February 12 at noon Instructional Technology hosted a tech snack on collaborative student assignments outside the classroom featuring Kendall Kelly, Assistant Professor of English, Writing, and Rhetoric. Dr. Kelly led a discussion that focused on these questions:

  • How can we get students to interact and collaborate outside of class meetings?
  • What kinds of online assignments engage students and enhance in-class learning?

Blog imageDr. Kelly began by describing how she gets her students to collaborate online using blogs, wikis, and group spaces in Blackboard and shared a handout, “Tips for Using Blogs to Improve Student Outcomes.” These tips underline the importance of structuring the use of blogging assignments so that there are clear expectations for students and that they are rewarded for their effort.  Blackboard allows Dr. Kelly to give private feedback and easily track student blogs and responses, so that this assignment does not impose an inordinate amount of work on the instructor. She says she is able to read 20 student blogs in about 30 minutes before class starts. Dr. Kelly motivates students by noting good blogs in front of the class.

Dr. Kelly uses this blogging assignment to help students read challenging theoretical texts for her freshman level course on technical communication. Her writing prompts guide their reading, and, by reviewing the blogs before class, she can see what students are thinking and where they aren’t understanding the text. These insights in turn lead to a richer in-class discussion.

Blogs offer an alternative to discussion boards, which are a common and long-established mainstay of online learning.  In contrast to the discussion board, blogs seem to inspire greater investment from students. They are more like mini-papers than the conversational interchange of the discussion board, and by being identified with one particular student, blogs allow for more development of a student’s voice.  The focus is on the student rather than the topic, as it might be in a discussion board.  In Dr. Kelly’s class, students compete to be recognized for their unique perspective in class.  For example, a recent class has been vying to see who can come up with the best food analogy to explain the reading.

By using the Blackboard tool for blogs rather than a public blog, Dr. Kelly offers a safe space for student discussion while still applying the pressure of a public class audience.  When asked about whether students resisted sharing their works with others, Dr. Kelly pointed out that collaborating with other students is a listed course objective on the syllabus, so students begin the course with this clear expectation. Overall, blogs allow Dr. Kelly’s students to improve their reading and writing outside of class in such a way that it raises the level of in class interaction.  This instructional design is a good example of effectively linking in- and out-of-class work in a hybrid or blended learning format.

Tips for Using Blogs to Improve Student Outcomes

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Blog imageKendall Kelly, Assistant Professor of English, Writing, and Rhetoric, is our guest blogger for this post:

Student blogging can create valuable learning opportunities.  Blogs can provide students the chance to work on particular skills like writing, audience analysis, or critical thinking, or engage a text or project in an asynchronous, low-stakes manner.  They give students a medium to engage classmates and allow the instructor to informally evaluate student comprehension before class begins.  However, to facilitate student learning, instructors need to use blogs properly.  Below I’ve listed some tips to maximize student learning.

  1. Write a prompt for each blog.
  2. Set a due date that gives students time to respond to one another’s blogs.
  3. Require students to respond to one another’s blogs.
  4. Set quality and quantity guidelines i.e. two paragraphs that analyze the salient point with evidence from the text.
  5. Grade every blog, every time. (I usually assign a point value to each blog and student response and just add them up as I go.  And I give extra credit to good blogs. )
  6. Integrate the information from the blogs into your lectures.  (Give a student a shout out for a good blog or even invite him or her to start class discussion.)
  7. Blogs are iterative and essentially collaborative (i.e. everyone’s reading everyone else’s blog), so one or two good bloggers can raise the bar for the class, and one or two bad bloggers can drag the class down.
  8. Use Blackboard for student blogs if possible.
    1. Blackboard allows you to give student grades.  They see their grade go up with each blog which encourages them to write the next blog.
    2. You also have the opportunity to give students private feedback on Blackboard, so if their blogs aren’t quite up to snuff, you can let them know.  Blogs are an iterative process, so if they don’t initially do well, they have the opportunity to improve.
    3. Blackboard will count blogs and comments for you.
    4. Blackboard will keep track of the grade and just put it in the grade sheet, if you set it up properly.
    5. And the blogs will only be available to the class which creates a safe place to write and keeps crazy outsiders from making inappropriate comments or using student information for nefarious purposes.
    6. Blackboard won’t allow students to post video (or at least it hasn’t in the past) or audio files so it may not work for every situation.  SEUfolios will allow multi-modal media and let students manipulate the format, so it might work for those assignments.

Note: WordPress Blogs are also available to St. Edward’s University, faculty, students, and staff through http://sites.stedwards.edu/blogs/ These sites can be set up as individual blogs or a group of blogs can be set up for a class. Contact Instructional Technology for more information.

References: Image available from Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blog_(1).jpg

Want to Get Text Messages Whenever Announcements or Grades Are Posted in Blackboard?

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Students can sign up via Rave Alerts to receive text or email messages from their Blackboard classes whenever a new announcement, grade or assignment is posted. It’s simple and faculty don’t need to do anything to enable this feature. By default all text and email alerts from Blackboard are turned off so students must opt in.

Rave Alerts are scheduled for delivery every 10 minutes, so if an instructor posts an announcement at 10:30 that class is cancelled for today, students who have signed up for text alerts should receive that message by 10:40.

How to Sign Up?

  1. Log into Blackboard

  2. Click on the Rave link in the Tools menu

  3. You will be automatically logged into Rave.  If you have previously configured your Rave account with a cell phone number you can go ahead and select the classes and alerts you wish to receive.  If you need to add your cell phone number to Rave see the instructions at Signing Up for Topper Text.  If  you have configured your Rave account you can go ahead and select the classes and areas from which to receive texts or emails.

  4. By default all text and email alerts are turned off.    You can choose Default Settings that will automatically be applied to all Blackboard classes. Remember that every announcement, grade, assignment or calendar entry will automatically generate a text message.  You may not want to get that many text messages for every Blackboard class.

  5. You can also choose to only get text or email from specific classes and specific areas.  Click in the boxes in the column under Announcements, Calendar items, Assignments or Grades to enable text messages.