The latest Canvas update includes one feature that is of particular interest: Individualized Learning Pathways.
(“Mastery Paths” in Canvas.) This will allow faculty the opportunity to
create customized experiences through the curricula – depending on the
students’ subject mastery.
Another reminder that we are not planning to renew CampusPack for the spring term. (Appears as a sidebar option in Canvas called CampusPack Tools.) Instead, watch for information regarding the integration of Office365 and OneNote into Canvas to replace CampusPack.
Canvas Tips and Tricks: Canvas Style Guide
For those of you who
are a little bit more adventuresome and like to noodle around with code,
here’s a style guide that provides some really interesting course
effects: https://emporiastate.instructure.com/styleguide You’ll find accordion menus, progress bars, “pills”, popovers, tabs, forms, grids, modals, buttons, and much more.
Learning Technologies Blog and Twitter Feed
If you want more information about anything you read here, check out our blog athttp://emporiastate.blogspot.com/or follow us on Twitter@esulearningtech. Our Twitter feed was recently ranked as one of the top educational Twitter feeds in the State of Kansas!
A reminder that we are not planning to renew CampusPack for the spring term.(Appears as a sidebar option in Canvas called CampusPack Tools.) This will be the last semester we license the product. There are several reasons why: The company has ceased product updates; there are better products that do the same thing for free; and usage is dropping. Instead, we plan to incorporate Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft OneNote, and enhanced Google Apps for Education to replace the collaboration features (blogs, journals, and wikis). Podcasts can be added as media elements to Canvas. Our Instructional Design team can assist faculty with migrating content from CampusPack. We encourage faculty that still use CampusPack to explore the Microsoft and Google options with our ID team.
UDOIT
We’re super excited to launch UDOIT (Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool) – a new feature developed by the University of Central Florida for checking accessibility in your Canvas courses. You’ll find UDOIT in your course menu. Refer to this video for a brief overview of how it works: https://vimeo.com/126968075 Using UDOIT you can run an inspection of your course for accessibility concerns. UDOIT does not auto-correct PowerPoint, Word, PDF and videos, but provides links that show you how to modify those files for students with disabilities.
Online Readiness Course
Learning Technologies is currently piloting an Online Readiness Course (ORC). Dr. Anna Catterson is leading this effort, but the entire Instructional Design team is involved. A group of volunteer faculty and staff are participating in the pilot course and will provide feedback in a few weeks. The modified course will be rolled out the spring term to all faculty.
Learning Technologies Blog and Twitter Feed
If you want more information about anything you read here, check out our blog athttp://emporiastate.blogspot.com/or follow us on Twitter@esulearningtech. Our Twitter feed was recently ranked as one of the top educational Twitter feeds in the State of Kansas.
Welcome to our newest members of
the ESU faculty family! There are more than 30 new faculty joining us this
semester! As part of a new program we’re rolling out, we’re pairing these
faculty with our Instructional Design team to provide in-depth support and
technology consultation. If you would like to be included in that program, drop
me a note!
Product Release:The latest 3-week product sprint (update) was released onSaturday, August 6th.
New features in this update are listed in detail below.
Learning Technologies reviews its
service portfolio on a regular basis in order to determine which technologies
should be abandoned and, conversely, which technologies should be adopted.
We’ve been looking carefully at Campus Pack developed by Learning Objects for
over a year. ESU has licensed this technology for about 8 years. It was
licensed at a time when our former LMS did not support social media
technologies. A lot has changed in 8 years. Reviewing a combination of faculty
survey input, usage data, licensing cost, and product support we’ve decided
that we will not renew our license with Learning Objects in January. The
product has not been updated in over a year and, more importantly, there are
better technologies available now to do the same thing (wikis, blogs, journals,
podcasts). Soon, Canvas will be unveiling a new product integration with Microsoft
Office 365 and Microsoft OneNote, and a deeper integration with Google Apps for
Education. These options will provide a much more robust integration experience
and better mobile accessibility. Hence, we’ll use this semester to begin
assisting faculty with migrating content off Learning Objects. We still have 5
months before the license expires. By that time we expect to be fully migrated
to Microsoft Office 365 and OneNote. If you would like to see a glimpse of
what’s on the horizon, refer to this video from the recent InstructureCon
conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdK4N3BYW3E
Panopto (Lecture Capture)
Updates
Over the summer we migrated
Panopto to the cloud. (Note, this did not affect the Earl Center due to HIPAA
compliancy.) By moving Panopto to the cloud we reduced the licensing expense,
improved product support, and expanded storage capability. Panopto Cloud offers
ESU unlimited storage, so we will no longer bump up against storage constraints
that affected system availability and performance. Note that you may need to
update your Panopto Recorder to point to https://emporia.hosted.panopto.com
We’re redirecting vulcan.emporia.edu to point to the new address for the
next couple of months. Along with this update, we added some graphical and
color enhancements to the Panopto portal. Functionality with Canvas has been
tested. No video data was lost in this product migration, but we did cull
duplicated, triplicated, and quadruplicated videos to reduce transfer time.
Kaltura Video Quizzing
We’re super excited to announce a
new feature in our streaming media product: Kaltura. You will know Kaltura as
“My Media” and “Media Gallery” inside Canvas. This new feature allows faculty
to overlay simple quizzing questions (MC and T/F) on top of the videos you
assign. You can add as many quizzes within a video as you desire. The responses
are automatically tabulated in the Canvas gradebook. So, if you assign students
videos to watch you can assess that they understood the content. Learn more
here: https://goo.gl/86fSc7
Or, talk with our Instructional Design team to learn how to add
quizzing to your course videos.
Learning Technologies Blog
and Twitter Feed
If you want more information about
anything you read here, check out our blog athttp://emporiastate.blogspot.com/or follow us on Twitter@esulearningtech.
You may have seen the recent Buzz In announcement
that we’re migrating Panopto (lecture capture) from on premise to the
cloud. The reason we’re doing this is threefold:
·Panopto Support can provide 24/7/365 support.
·There is unlimited storage.
·The cost is lower.
What will this mean for you?
·All the videos will migrate forward. You will not lose any archival content.
·Your campus login will remain the same.
·We will no longer need to prune videos to save storage space.
·The
system reliability will improve tremendously. Formerly when we ran out
of space the entire system locked up. That will no longer be a concern.
·We’ll always be on the latest and greatest version of Panopto.
·Note: This does not affect the Community Counseling version of Panopto which will remain on-campus due to HIPAA.
·With
the change in URL comes a change in the Recorder address. We’ll update
the Recorders in the Learning Spaces, but if you have a Recorder at home
or your office you will need to make this URL change yourself.
What about Canvas integration with Panopto?
·Nothing will change regarding this integration or how you add videos to courses.
Timeline:
·This
Thursday noon (7/14) through Friday noon (7/15) you will not be able to
upload new Panopto content while the migration is underway. However,
current content will still be viewable. You can also create content and
save it offline.
·On Friday morning we’ll update the Canvas/Panopto integrator.
Emporia State University, Flint Hills Technical College, Emporia
Public Library and the Emporia Recreation Center are partnering to
create a week-long summer camp titled the “TECHMaker Youth Academy” to
be held July 25-29, 2016. The target age for this camp is geared towards
students entering 5th grade through entering 12th grade, who want to
learn about fun and engaging computer technology applications. Sessions
will be offered in a variety of fields including: multimedia production,
programming, robotics, graphical design, manufacturing, and art.
Sessions are being taught by volunteer faculty, staff, students, and
alumni of ESU, Flint Hills Technical College, and the Emporia Public
Library. A final showcase will be held on Friday, July 29th
to highlight projects completed by students during the week. Students
will develop skills to allow them the opportunity to become “Makers”.
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!
Registration is now open at the Rec Center! You must drop off your registration form and payment AT the Rec Center before all of the spots fill up. Pick up registration forms at the Rec Center, at the Emporia Public Library, or click here to download and print the form. Session descriptions can be viewed here.
Registration cannot be submitted online. July 25-29th Techmaker Camp; drop off students between 8:00 – 8:30 at Visser Hall Atrium, Emporia State University.
Registration for this week-long camp is $30.00 and will include all
expenses including: five days of tinkering, lunches, morning and
afternoon snacks T-shirt and dinner for all registrants and families on
Friday, July 29th.
What will the week will look like?
The ESU Visser Hall doors will open at 8:00 for attendees to be dropped off, and sessions will begin at 8:30.
Each of the 5 days will have a two morning sessions, a snack, a
boxed lunch as a group, and two afternoon sessions. Students will have
the opportunity to gain experiences in ten different technologies by the
end of the week.
The day ends at 4:30, and attendees will be picked up by 5:00, except on Friday. Friday, July 29th
is the open house Friday Finale, where families can attend the
Techmaker picnic and view completed projects. The picnic will begin at
5:30 and conclude at 7:00 pm.
As you will soon see, we’ve made the successful transition
to the new Canvas User Experience – modeled after Canvas Mobile. Now both
environments will have a consistent user experience. You will immediately
notice that things have moved around a bit. Options formerly across the top are
now on the side. However, this is to your advantage. Mail messages are now easier
to locate, as is your profile information and calendar. Moreover, the screen
now includes more horizontal space that responsively scales to the device using
a collapsible menu toggle. The logout option is now located under your profile.
The “cards” that represent courses can also be modified. In addition, each card
includes linked icons that represent Announcements, Assignments, Discussions,
and Files should they be enabled in the course.
Additionally, we’ve enabled a feature called “Commons” that
allows faculty to browse a global course catalog relative to subject areas,
including K12. This content is a curated collection of free and open resources
developed by faculty and teachers from across the globe who use Canvas. If the
author has set sharing permissions, faculty at ESU can download and install
this content into your own courses. A content preview option is available prior
to installing. Similarly, departments at ESU can make sharable content
available to adjuncts and other faculty using Commons. Visit with one of the
instructional designers in Learning Technologies for a more in depth tour of
Commons.
Google Slides is bringing back the classroom tool that nobody knew they were missing out on
Google Moderator was a spectacular teaching tool in a spectacularly bad package. That's probably why Google scrapped it a while ago. Moderator allowed a presenter to pose a question or a prompt, and the audience could submit responses. The kicker was that the audience could then vote on each other's responses so that the best would rise to the top, and the worst would sink to the bottom. It was just really cumbersome to set up and use, and Google didn't feature it enough to bring in a lot of users, so it disappeared without a trace, and very few people noticed. But those who did notice were pretty sad about it.
But now it's back, sort of. Instead of being a stand-alone application, it is now called Audience Q&A, and it is a part of Google Slides (their version of PowerPoint). When giving the pros and cons of why you would want to use Google Slides over the more familiar PowerPoint, the Audience Q&A should significantly tip the scales in favor of Google Slides, given how rarely most presenters take advantage of PPT's more advanced features anyway (see: Animations).
When you play a Google Slide show, you can choose to display the Presenter View on your screen while the presentation plays.
From there, you can start an Audience Q&A session.
Your audience sees a banner at the top of the presentation, telling them where to post questions.
Once at that URL, they can submit their questions and see previous posts to vote them up or down. They have the option of using their Google account identity or posting anonymously. *I haven't seen where this option can be turned off for classroom use, if you don't want an anonymous bonehead to derail class.
Your presenter view will update itself with the audience questions, moving the highest-rated to the top.
By selecting "Present" below one of the responses, that featured question is shown on the projection screen for deeper audience discussion, and it can then be hidden to continue with the presentation.
What happens to the comments/questions after you finish the presentation?
After exiting the presentation, the next time you open it with the Presenter View you have the option of continuing a recent session or starting a new one from scratch. If you start one from scratch, the recent ones will still live in the cloud somewhere, so the data isn't just lost. If you choose "Continue recent," you are given a list of previous sessions in order of date and time. Pick the one you want to continue across multiple courses, training sessions, etc. to keep going, although the original voting would still be present, making new contributions slower to rise to the top. *I don't know how long the Q&A stays there, and whether they will disappear from the "Recent" list, so if there are some vital questions, you would want to back those up in some other way.
For more information about Slides and Q&A, visit the Google Docs Blog, and/or which this video showing it in action:
