Happy New Year ESU!

Happy New Year ESU Canvas Community!

The latest Canvas updates are noted below. This update will occur on January 7^th.

Product Releases:

January 7^th Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

December 12^th iOS Detailed Release Notes

Smarthinking

This utility (online tutoring) has been removed from Canvas and will not be renewed. Instead, two new options for tutoring now appear on your course sidebar: ACES and WritingLab. These services reside in White Library. Students requesting tutoring should contact one or both of these campus services. Online students can participate in remote tutoring services provided through ACES.

CampusPack (Learning Objects)

This utility (blogs, wikis, journals, podcasts) has been removed from Canvas and will not be renewed. Instead, ….

Office365 + Canvas

….we are soliciting faculty who would like to voluntarily pilot two new Canvas enhancements: Office365 and OneNote. We’re requesting faculty opt into these new utilities for the Spring 2017 term during the pilot program. Here’s a little bit more about them….

Office 365 + Canvas: https://goo.gl/PBJVh5  (Provides the ability to add and collaborate using PowerPoint, Excel, and Word files through Canvas and OneDrive.)

OneNote + Canvas: https://goo.gl/rhLJK2 (Provides the ability to journal and blog using OneNote – a surprisingly powerful tool and supports multimedia.)

If you would like to participate in the pilot, please contact one of the Instructional Designers (Mark, Anna, Joe) and request to be included.

Panopto

The link for Panopto has changed to make it shorter and not wrap onto two sidebar lines. It now reads Panopto Videos rather than Panopto Recordings.

Learning Technologies Blog and Twitter Feed

If you want more information about anything you read here, check out our blog at http://emporiastate.blogspot.com/ or follow us on Twitter @esulearningtech. Our Twitter feed is one of the top educational Twitter feeds in the State of Kansas!

Good Afternoon ESU Canvas Community!

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.

Product Releases:

November 19^th Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

November 18^th Android  Detailed Release Notes

November 16^th Canvas Parent App Detailed Release Notes

November 21^st Canvas Commons Detailed Release Notes

CampusPack

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 at http://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!

An update from Learning Technologies...

Good Morning ESU Canvas Community!

It has been a month or so since I sent a Canvas update. Since that time two additional Canvas updates were rolled out:

Product Releases:

August 27^th   Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

September 17^th  Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

Learning Objects CampusPack

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 at http://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 back!

Good Morning ESU Canvas Community!

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 on Saturday, August 6^th. New features in this update are listed in detail below.

August 6^th  Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

Learning Objects Campus Pack

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 at http://emporiastate.blogspot.com/ or follow us on Twitter @esulearningtech.

Panopto Update

Good afternoon!

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.

Does anything change?

·         The only thing that will change is the URL. Until now you’ve accessed the Panopto server using https://vulcan.emporia.edu/  either directly or through Canvas. That URL will change to https://emporia.hosted.panopto.com  

·         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.

·         On Friday afternoon, Panopto Engineers will redirect https://vulcan.emporia.edu/   to https://emporia.hosted.panopto.com  

·         Starting ASAP after that cutover, the Learning Spaces Techs will begin the process of changing the URLs on the Recorders.

·         Note: You will not see video content on the new system until the database migration is complete.

If something should change with regard to this proposed schedule I’ll let you know ASAP. Let me know if you have any questions!

Rob

TechMaker Youth Academy Registration

TechMaker Youth Academy Information

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 29^th 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 25-29^th
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 29^th.

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 29^th 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.