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:
