Kristi Reyes: I ask you for those of you, if you are already using Canvas-- if you're not, you can just check the chat and get some ideas. Tell us one thing that you like about Canvas. Only if you are already using Canvas, what do you like about it? Creating books, speed grader, easy-to-use, robust, user-friendly, students can work independently, you don't need to have a specific due date-- yeah-- flexible, different Class Settings, external tools.

So I would agree with all of you said, I have used Moodle as a facilitator for teachers. I have used Blackboard as a teacher. I have taken courses in Moodle. I have taken courses in Canvas. And I have talked with canvas. I know in LAUSD use Schoology, if that's the correct pronunciation. Can anybody from LA can type in yes if I got that right?

And then a lot of schools, adult ed, like to use Edmodo. I think there are a couple others that are not coming to mind but, one, Google Classroom. And the argument of the teachers in my program for using Google Classroom is because their kids are using Google classroom. So I think that's wonderful.

My school has chosen, like the majority of community colleges in California have decided to use Canvas. So that is what's used when our adult students go on in their college and careers. So is there anything as challenging, only for those who view, who do already use Canvas, what is challenging? What's hard about Canvas?

You think the quizzes and assignments are a bit hard. OK. Creating quizzes. New students, yeah. Yes, building a course is very time-consuming. I've been using Canvas for almost, I think, six years now. I have a ton of content in there. But that first semester or two really took a lot of time.

I had all the content and I had a lot of electronic files but getting it online can take up a lot of time. And it can be difficult for students who only have a phone, Pamela. Hi, Pamela. Yeah, so there is an app, it's not perfect. They can do a lot but not everything. And when you are looking at a phone, it's very small. So if they're like me, my eyes are getting so bad from looking at phone.

Is there anything that you would like to do or have students to be able to do in Canvas that you don't see how it can be done right now? Just becoming confident to do their assignments, to do the work. I'll tell you, it was almost six years ago that I started teaching my ESL classes, an advanced class as hybrid. And I was so nervous. It was summer class. You know how students are in the summer. And it was at night. And there's the beach, my school is like walking distance to the beach. And I was thinking, this is going to be a disaster.

Just first of all, the class, no one's going to show up. And second of all, I put all this work into putting everything in Canvas and they're not going to come. Guess what, they came. The first, there was a little bit of pushback here and there because one student said, why are we doing it like this and why do we have this part online? And I showed her how she could use her phone.

She was using her phone only as a phone. No one showed her that her phone is a powerful little computer. By the end of the class, she was posting on Canvas. She was like, she had 100 hours in Canvas. So just like anything. The teacher is the motivator, as well as the content. And the connections between students, that's what keeps students coming back.

So is there a best tool or best overall feature inside Canvas that you or your students use? Again, for those of you who do use Canvas. Conversations students post videos and the discussion board. Yeah, that is a very awesome tool. You can link it with ConferZoom. Annie Gilbert, I know your name, very familiar your name. I don't think we've ever met in person.

Discussions. Yes, Pamela. It logs the hours. Students don't know that. So it's kind of funny when I do have a face to face class, and I said, look, we're in week 3, you should have been in Kansas already now because it's hybrid class-- about nine hours. And you were in there for 20 minutes. Like, how do you know that? Yeah.

Thank you, yes. Someone mentioned the Project Idea. This is out of Washington state, maybe some of you know about the I-BEST program, which is now called IET. It started in Washington State with a fund from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Project idea is taking that idea and get students prepared. And you can import their whole entire course into your own Canvas course. Yes, so canvas has great interface with different apps and programs.

So thank you for all that information. It's being recorded here. So those of you who never use Canvas, come back and look at this recording when it is up, and see what sort of things you might want to check out that you don't necessarily learn. There's just so many tools. This is why I really love Canvas. There's just so much more that we can do, I feel, in my experience using Blackboard for many years.

So here are the objectives for today. Again, I can't teach you Canvas in an hour, but you'll see some things that you could that will help you learn how to do this. And I have resources at the end to help you learn how to build your course. So again, the session focuses on what you do for a learning unit.

So by the end of today's session, you will be able to discuss some features of online teaching in adult education in general, and to explain the value of using Canvas in particular. You'll be able to relate a way of organizing online activities in Canvas to mirror the best we can what we're doing in an online environment as to what we would do in our own classes.

Of course, it will never be exactly the same, but the closer we get to creating connections between students and with students, the more that it's like what we do in our actual classrooms face to face. And that's what will keep students coming back to your course. You should be able to explain a process for packaging online lesson activities in two modules. And even for those who've never used Canvas, hopefully you will walk away with one new idea you can adapt for using Canvas in your own teaching.

So I'm just going to go through this really fast. This whole remote learning got thrown on us very fast. And for a long time, in adult ed, we heard teachers and administrators say, no, students aren't ready for that. But look, 91% have their cellphones, a smartphone, and this information comes from OTAN's tech survey. So you know that every agency that receives WIOA funds, 10% of the student enrollment have to take the survey. A lot more than 10 often do, a lot more than 10% of the enrollment.

But they are ready. They have their phones. The one tough thing is a lot of them do not have wired internet in their homes. So they're using their phones and data to do our courses. So it's a little bit of a negative. But I've been following the CDE on LinkedIn, and it looks like they're coming up with digital equity plan. Some way that all of our learners can have easy access to internet. If it's just driving up a van in, maybe, a housing community and that would be one way for everybody to get Wi-Fi.

So here in California, our adult ed is pretty cutting edge. And our students then are pretty innovative and pretty good with technology when you start to compare them with other states, let me tell you. So 65% of our students already use technology to get information, and 50%, this was from 2018-19, 50% we're already using technology to learn in class, and 41% out of class.

So they are ready. Not everyone has the access but we're getting closer and closer. This 91%, it was a lot lower a few years ago, and it just keeps creeping upward. So hopefully this could be the silver lining of this virus that our state will recognize that we need more digital equity and will roll out these plans that they're discussing.

This is a little bit more information. I'm not going to go over everything, but you can just look over it and see what catches your eye. Our students are using their phones a lot to do research and in class. Those the top two ways. And you can see, yes, there they're doing a lot of entertainment, but they're using social media a whole lot already.

And how do they communicate with their teacher? Well, I hate to say it teachers were pretty much old school. A lot of them-- me, I confess-- yes, I still email my students but I'm starting to use Remind, so I'm trying to do more texting while keeping my own cell phone number private and so on. But students are texting a lot.

And look at that though, not many people, not many of our students are communicating with their teacher through an online course. But I can see that, I would rather have my students email me directly than to send me an email through Canvas to be honest. But there we see the numbers for the smartphones.

So why Canvas? As I mentioned, there are something like, I don't know. There are more community colleges than listed here, but of about 113 have committed to using Canvas as their course management system. Just so that one, if a student starts at one community college, they go to another, it's not going to be such a burden on them to have to learn an entire new LMS.

So it's free. There is the Canvas that is free. And then if you're part of a community college, then you're getting the whole package, which is not a whole lot more. But you can get this for free. And as I mentioned in the beginning, there's great tech support, I've heard. I've never used it myself, but it's open source so you can take your course with you if you go to an another job. It's easy migration. So I finished my class from this term, and I want to repeat exactly the same next year at this time, I can just download and upload. It's super fast and easy.

There are assignments, quizzes and other activities that are automatically linked to the Gradebook. There's a mobile app for both students and teachers. It's decent, but it's not the best. I just have to be honest there. You can set your notification preferences. There's chat and email built-in. And there are many, many options for customization, navigation, entry points, profiles and so on. Some of these things we're going to go over.

And I've noticed, now, I'm not sure if this is true on the free version, but you can award badges to students. Does anybody know what badges are? Do you want to type in the chat what a badge is? And thank you for the person, Anthony, for putting the information about I-BEST best in there.

Anybody know what a badge is?

So a badge is usually like some sort of little icon that we could gain as well, teachers, but that we can award students and they could put on their their social networking profile or whatever that shows, oh, I finished a course using canvas. Something like that. It's so easy to embed online content. I remember with Blackboard, I had to find the QR code for a video. I had to do like, four steps or more. And in Canvas, if you've noticed, if I find a video on YouTube, I just put it into the area. And it does automatic embedding for me, which is really nice.

You can create groups. Your discussions don't have to be just text. They can include images, audio, or video. You can see statistics of use of your students in the course. You can have a calendar for students, if you set specific due dates for different assignments. And both you, as instructor and students, can have a to-do list.

So when I enter my courses, in the top right corner, you see there, I can see what things have been submitted and I need to grade. So I don't remember that with other. I think it does exist in Moodle but it's not as easy. Because for Canvas, I can just click on there, it's going to take me straight to that student submission.

Students can see recently graded assignments. You can comment on uploaded documents. And assignments can have a rubric right there in Canvas. You can import. You can export. You can share your course. You can get course materials from comments, Canvas comments. Many of that-- there are so many apps that can be integrated, including ConferZoom. And there's a student e-portfolio.

And here's the nice thing. We had to do this so fast, change this remote learning, that students didn't get a textbook for my class. The copyright law is like 10%, but I can link to things outside of my course that I want them to read. And I'm not breaking copyright law by doing that.

This was in infographics I just saw in LinkedIn. Obviously, we missed out. We should have invested in Canvas and Zoom about two months ago. We would be very rich. Anyway, well, canvas is open source, so it is free. It's not a corporation like Zoom necessarily. But look at the data, wow. There's a lot going on online definitely.

So when you're creating a learning unit in any course, planning out in advance what will go on line is going to save you a lot of time and headaches. So I think it was in 2015, I'm lucky, very lucky, and so much gratitude for the fact that I do have a full time tenured position. I wish every teacher in adult ed could. Because what I got was a few months off for a sabbatical, where I could focus on learning about teaching online.

So I got my TESOL, online teaching certification, and there's another one for community college faculty called @ONE. I did both of those and I felt like I was in grad school again. It was so much work, but I learned a lot. And so I know not everybody has that same opportunity. So that's why I'm here sharing what I learned in several months in a nutshell. So that you don't have to pay for the coursework that I paid for.

But what I learned is you need to have a production plan in advance. And I'm not going to show you this one. When you see the slides, you can click on it and see how outlined I had to be. So it reminds me of when I first started teaching. When I was in graduate school, we had to present a lesson plan, because I'm a trained teacher actually. So we had to present a lesson plan. We had to turn in a written lesson plan. And we had a write out every single little thing we were going to say and do.

Well, of course, with more experience, I don't need to do that. Because, as you know, as you get more experience in teaching, you can just have, maybe, an agenda and you have the lesson plan and what you're saying do in your head. So now, when I'm working on building online materials, I don't do this necessarily. I do something a little bit more abbreviated. But you can have a look at that. Because you need to plan in advance. If you are just building next week's content on Sunday night, you're going to be at the computer for many hours.

So consider how you will include and easy to understand welcoming home page. I've seen some different teacher's home page, and it's just like, nothing. There's just text there. Need to welcome students. And a lots of tools we can use to make this.

You want consistency in each module. What I mean by module, in my case is a week of work. For you, it depends on what you're teaching. It might be stretch over one week. You maybe will have a module that covers two weeks. But you want the look and feel and organization to be consistent. When you start doing that, it makes it a lot easier for students.

You will want to figure out how you're going to do scaffolding to get to your end objective and build in a lot of recycling as well, of course, content. Because you maybe teach it in week 1, and when you get to week 7, it's not still there and necessarily. So you need to figure out how you're going to do that.

You want to make sure you have opportunities for students' self-reflection. That's research shows very important thing for students to be able to articulate to themselves what they learned and what they still need to do. And you want to make sure you have plenty of opportunities for you to give feedback to students of course, but for students to give feedback to you.

You want a variety of input. So not necessarily, again, all text-- read this, read this, read this. Watching videos-- look at this infographic, different content. And you want to present course content in more than one mode. That's what I'm meaning different input, not just text. And you need to think about how you're going to assess student's learning. Because probably in our classes we use classes test. And we use maybe some quizzes that we made and that's how we decided if the student should be promoted or not. Well, it looks different online of course.

So in this course that I had to take on testing, assessing students work in an online environment, we had to do a similar plan. And so I had to take some of my typical classroom assessments, a variety of them whether it's projects or whether it's just a multiple choice test. And figure out how it would work best online.

And then the last thing you want to try to do is have some redundancy. So I'll show you an example of that in a little while. But for some of our students first time to do online learning, we don't want them to have to be searching all over the page where to go next. So what we want is something that's very clear and easy to understand. And redundancy will help with that.

So what I want to talk about first, before we get into how to build a learning unit, is, again, that welcome that you can give to students. So you see on the bottom left, that's called the tile. When students log in, and if they're taking more than one class, they may see multiple tiles. Well, the default for the tile is just a color. So can you imagine this class that I had back in December, when they logged into Canvas, they saw their classmate's face. And so that's kind of personalizing the content and welcoming them quite a bit.

And then you can see on the right, I created a banner with a different class. So we were face to face with 25% hybrid. So you know that first week, I went around with my phone and took pictures of everybody or I had them take pictures and send it to me in the computer lab. And this was the banner once they entered the course. So that is the way that you can welcome. Because otherwise, it could be very sterile and boring and not inviting. So little things like this can make students want to log in and do the work.

So these are two entry points. So again, the tile is what that's called. You see, I have a screenshot from my dashboard. The current classes I'm teaching on top, my department has a Canvas course where we share EL civics things and tech tips and teaching ideas and all of that. And then I'm on a college committee, too. So my eye naturally goes to the college committee one because I miss my donuts so much.

So the tile is your first entry point. You can see for my level 7 class, it's a little bit stale, but it's been there since the beginning. So they know that that's that classes, because they're taking 3-4 classes, some of them. So it's what the students see. You need to make it memorable. How do you do that?

Well, you can upload an image. So I would recommend of copyright-free stock photo site like Pixabay. You don't have to pay for those photos unless it's one of the very top, you have to pay for those. But there are lots of great photos there. Maybe take a photo. Or you could create a tile with Canva. Notice that doesn't have an s. There's Canvas, this learning management system, and there's Canva, which we're going to look at in a minute.

But how you get your tile set is you log into your course, you click on that tile that's there to get to the course, and you-- number 1, way at the bottom of your left navigation is settings, then you go to the top tab, course details, and then you click on the little three vertical circles. And you can upload an image.

So I've done this with just images. As you saw, I put students pictures. Canva is just so beautiful. I love this site. Well, Canva, I got this email from canvas because I set up an account once to have students do a project to create their own infographics. And they sent me this email. And evidently, it says, Canva supporting teachers, parents. And students when it comes to adapting student learning. They have thousands of free templates and resources that you can use to plan lessons and keep students engaged and empowered.

So let me just show you. You can see on the far right, these are some of their templates. I'm going to just go there so that you can see it for a second. I mean, this site is amazing. You can see, I created some different things here. But you can create customized beautiful templates for social media posters, presentations, infographics, Facebook covers. So this is where you could create a banner or a tile for your course. There's just so much here.

So all you do is you just select the one style that you like, and you change the words and you can add other photos. It's free. There are just some beautiful pictures that you do need to pay for. So if you pay for the full subscription, it unlocks everything. But I never pay for anything, very cheap.

So what you could do with Canva is you could create your personal brand. You could create a brand for you and your teaching career the rest of your life. So whenever you're showing a PowerPoint slide show, or a Google slides, or maybe you create a handout, or you have your online course, you can have similar design all the time. And when a student or a colleague picks up, says, oh, I know that's Barbara, that's her brand.

So I don't work for Canva or anything like that. I just think it's a cool site. Lots of beautiful templates there.

So with that, once you make sure that you just entering the courses of welcoming a warm hand right to bring in the students, then you need to also think about your front page. A front pages a home page. In Canvas, what you do is when you create a page, you select that one as your front page, the one that you want students to see first.

Now, I've seen some front pages that were just text. And you can see mine, it's a lot of text but I use some, I leave some white space. But I tried to keep with my theme by having that banner at the top. So you can create a banner in Canva, or you can create a banner with PowerPoint. And I'm not going to go step by step for you, but you can look at these slides later and you can test it out. You can email me if you have problems.

But in PowerPoint, you go to the Design tab. And far on the right, there's a custom slide size. And you choose banner. And then you can use any of those beautiful designs the PowerPoint has. And you could put your name, you could put your picture in it, and then you save it not as a PowerPoint, but as a JPEG, an image file. And so as you saw before, then you just go to your settings and you upload that image.

Now, here's my home page, my front page. I have right there in the front, frequently asked questions for our students. I have optional, join the remind class, so I can text them and they can text me. And then I have the link to our Zoom meeting. It's always the same. I made it as a recurring meeting.

And then a little instruction-- start with the week below or select modules. So on the left, I cut it out but the modules is in the navigation. And so there's never any where do I go, because look how big did I made that-- week 3, click there. And so I start with week 0 and I go up. And then really I usually only have a maximum of three weeks listed. Because if we're already like, in week 3, and they didn't do week 0, then just skip it, just forget it.

So I've seen teachers do it different ways. I've seen teachers at my college who teach online and they put the whole course-- 16 weeks, visible. And for me, I think, if I were a student, I think that I would be really intimidated. I know there are some of you. And I know you, Donna, and some of you folks here today, that you like to get things done. When you see, I need to do all this. I'm going to get it done right now. And so I think you want to keep things hidden. So if you've got something planned for next week or the following week, keep it hidden. It's really easy to do.

And one thing I'll mention, I'm not a web designer or anything like that, but when you want to have, where you see my little class information, to get the alignment, like that, is when you go in to create your page, you'll want to use a table. And then things will stay aligned like that. And then you can see at the bottom, I include a pinned discussion. So I'm going to talk about discussion forums in a minute.

But there's one right there, it's like what we call the parking lot sometimes. It's just questions about anything, I don't care, about the class, about the weather, order or order out, delivery food recommendations And then there's an orientation to Canva.

So this is what nearly every single time and they, right there, to look at the week number. And that's where they're going to go. The current weak number is always on top.

My colleague, she's much more creative than I am. And she teaches a lower level ESL. So she created her little avatar on Bitmoji and she uses Buncee. I don't know if anyone here was able to see her presentation last Friday. I wasn't able to. I really wanted to. Because Buncee-- look at the design. It reminds me of Canva but it can do even more. So working with her audience, she creates this really cute welcome right there. And you can check out her slides on the OTAN COVID resources website.

Another view-- because I know there are some of you who teach maybe beginning level ESL. And so this is one of my colleagues. She shared with me a short recording of her homepage. So she used a very graphical design. And then she has a week 1. And she did list all of her weeks, but what I really like is-- I better not show her Zoom ID. OK, there-- what I really like is that she started with the current week at top. Because we don't want them to have to go down to the bottom for the current week.

So when you're creating your banners or any course content on Canvas, there's something called the student view which I'll show you in a little bit. And I would really recommend looking at it on a phone, looking at it on a tablet, looking at it on the app, and also in a web browser and a computer. Because you know sometimes I've put in things and it looks fine and on my very large computer screen. and when I look at it on a phone, I see there really small font or just it got all cut off. And it looks weird, the alignment is off. So check it a few times.

And in Canvas, there's a student view to see-- make sure that you have the right things hidden that you don't want students to see, if you can see exactly what a student would see. And as I said, consider your audience. So if you're teaching low level ESL, pictures and things like that, graphics. If you're teaching something like chemistry, well, you're probably, maybe you'll include some cool icon or something. But you probably will have a bit more text-based.

So then going to the of navigation, before we start to say, I asked Melinda because she's an expert, and I'm not an expert on this. But I have been told before that not to have too many things on your navigation. So the navigation on Canvas is always on the left side. And by default, there are several there. But if you can imagine your student going into Canvas for the first time and see all of these navigation points, I don't even know where to start. Maybe home, I guess, I don't know.

So the right number is 6. Repeat after me, 6. 6 on the navigation. So 6 is reasonable. I think I have a few more because one of mine is net tutor, that's tutoring during search service. And I kind of like, name coach. But anyway, I'll explain a little bit more about those. But what you can do is you go to your settings in your navigation. You go up to the navigation tab. And you see the ones that are top, they will show for students.

If there's something here you don't want, like I don't want them to chat, then I can click on that and I just drag it down to the disabled items and save. If there's something down here, maybe I want ConferZoom up here, I can just click on it, drag it up and save. So you have that option to modify your navigation like most learning management systems do.

One thing that Canvas does is it puts announcements that you send above your banner in your home page. So I do email my students, like two times a day, right now. No one's complained yet, but I don't want them to walk away from my class and try so hard. I have like 100% persistence so far. So I'm going to keep it that.

But if I have this set as putting all of the announcements there, they're not going to see what they need to do until they scroll really far down. So you can control the number of announcements that are posted on your home page. You go to settings in the bottom of your navigation, course details. And there's a tiny little part way at the bottom, it's just some words that say, more options. If you click that, then you can say, I want just one announcement, the most recent announcements. I want two. I said it for three. So they can see yesterday and the two I sent today or something.

And last thing about entry points to navigation. So this shows you what I was just mentioning about where you find that thing in the course details and then in the settings, more options. And then you can see, you can set lots of different things here for the homepage. So how many announcements, let students attach files to discussions, those are some other settings in here as well that you want to check out.

And going back to the personalization-- oh my gosh. It's so important for you to put your picture there and for your students to put their picture there. That's one of the first things they have students do is have them create their profile. So this was a few years back when I was teaching vessel career track. And this was my student Sandra, I cut off her last name. I don't think she doesn't mind if I told you her information. She worked for Coca-Cola Company.

And you can see, she was in a couple different classes. So her profile will follow her when she's using Canvas at our course. And then they can put their social media. And I set my profile, too. So when you log in, you're going to go to the little blue box on the left, and you're going to go to profile, you upload a picture, you can put your social media links, you can give a little information about yourself. This is really nice, because then students can learn a little bit about you before. They even join your class.

And then you see here, my badges. And then there's something-- I don't think this is on free version-- name coach recorder. I love that. I'm going to show you that when we get a little bit later. But even if we're not meeting our students face to face, I would like to know how to pronounce their name. And I would like them to know how to pronounce my name.

So when you come back to here, these slides, if you click right here, it will show you step by step how to create a profile and you can share that with your students. If some students who really resist to put their own picture, well, that's fine. If they want to put in a rose bush, I'm fine with that. But it is better when you're doing a discussion board to be able to see the other person's face that you're writing to.

So now we're going to go to the organization of a learning unit within Canvas. So you want to probably either keep on the left navigation the syllabus. And what I do is I just upload the PDF file, and any file that is uploaded, it looks like this. They don't have to download it unless they want to. It's kind of just embedded and scrollable within the page.

So you can use files to upload any kind of documents, images, even videos. And a file can be added to a module alone. And it's automatically embedded like this. But you could also put it as a link in a page. So we create pages to deliver content.

So there are many different things within Canvas. There are external links. I saw someone mentioned that in the text. So they don't see the ugly URL, that's like 25 letters long or whatever. They just see the name of the site. You can use assignments for graded tasks, but they can be un-graded tasks, too. And you use quizzes to assess. Quizzes and assignments are automatically linked to the Gradebook.

But you can choose to have a quiz bee, a practice quiz, and it's not included in the grades. So as you see here, when you create a quiz, practice quiz, you can create a survey or un-graded survey. You can shuffle the answers. You can have a time limit which I never do. Allow multiple attempts, I always do that. I read this book that I really enjoy and I always tell any teacher I can about it. And where is it, I'm looking for at my belt bookshelf. It's how to deliver lessons so that students remember are content. I'm going to think of the title and let you know before we go.

But it said that basically we should let students take multiple attempts at a quiz. Why? If they take it once and they get 60%, and that's it, do you think they're really going to go back and study those questions they got wrong? Only the most conscientious and motivated students will, right? So they will, if we don't give them another chance, they're going to remember 40% of the content incorrectly. So I always allow multiple attempts, and then that the quiz score that stays is the one that they did the best on, the highest score.

You can have students see their quiz responses or not. You can let them see the correct answers. You can have one question at a time. You can require an access code which I never do because I teach non-credit. And so on. So this one, filter IP addresses, I think that's to make sure that they're not having someone else take the quiz for them or something.

A learning unit, what is a learning unit? Think WIPPEA. I know some of you are teacher trainers, there in our group today. If you can, type in the chat what does W stand for, warm up or review, because sometimes a lesson goes over several days or something like that. Or you maybe do a little formative assessment like, oh no. We need to review and I need to teach this all over again.

I is introduction. P is presentation. P, the other P, is practice. I think that that is a weakness I meant of myself. But probably a lot of us that we spend a lot of time setting up the content and getting them the background knowledge, but then we don't give them enough practice. So there's got to be more than just one practice activity. It has to be multiple different types of practice activities. And E, evaluation. And A, application.

And so the way that we should create a unit is thinking, again, Bloom's taxonomy or Webb's depth of knowledge has been around for a long time. What do we want students to do at the end? What do we want them to produce at the end? Same as with a lesson plan, what do we want them to be able to do with this information that we gave them?

So both of these follow a backwards design, lesson planning and thinking of Bloom's taxonomy as well, and building a learning unit online. We want to start with the end first. What is the objective? What is the desired outcome? What do you want students to be able to do with what you are teaching them?

And so we start there, and then we go backwards. What am I going to do for a warm up? How about I use a picture? How am I going to introduce this? Maybe I'll have a video. So you need to start thinking of what you could do online for each of these building backwards. You like my animation? You like it.

So I brainstormed and I thought what could you do for a warm up or review. A warm up or review is an activity to review previously learned content or to focus on the new topic. Introduction, to focus their attention and to help them understand why you're teaching this and you need to relate it to their needs, goals in lives. And you are trying to see by introducing if they know anything about it. Maybe they don't know anything about it, maybe you need to expand out, scale out, your lesson and more.

Presentation, you're introducing the new content. A lot of us still, I still, use PowerPoint. Now, online, I make a video. So that's why I'm introducing the new content. And videos-- great, but it's not for everyone. So when you can-- this is called universal design-- when you can present the information in more than one mode, more than one way. Because we know some people are readers, some people want to see a picture, some people need to move, some people need another thing, like they need to hear it. So when you can, either in the presentation or in the practice, include more than one type of input.

So practice is where we do the I do, we do, you do, so modeling activities, monitoring students, providing feedback. Evaluation is we're testing to see if they got it or not. And we should include in the evaluation a chance for students to reflect on their learning. And application is really where are they going to use this out in the world. How is this going to help them in their day to day lives? How can they transfer this new knowledge to a new situation?

So does anybody want to say what you do for a warm-up? I'm going to skip this and just show you that again a warm up review could be a video, an image, question prompt, to answer in a discussion, a Zoom meeting, a poll, conversation groups and a Zoom meeting. Introduction, again, could be a video or text, content on a page, a file, external link. Presentation could be-- so there is some overlap of what you could use.

You could create a video. You could make a narrative slide show.

Melinda Holt: Kristi, we also have vocabulary, Kahoot, and reviewing with-- using a positive quote related to life.

Kristi Reyes: Oh, I love that. Nice. So Kahoot could be used in the beginning to assess what they know. And then you could do Kahoot or some other you know fun quizzing site to find out if they did better. Hopefully they did.

Discussion forums-- I was talking to Melinda, and I think anybody here, if you've ever taken an online course, there is no online course in this world that doesn't have discussion forum. It's always there. The great thing with Canvas is there are multiple ways you can participate, doesn't only have to be writing. So assignment could be a practice and un-graded quiz, external links, group activities. Evaluation is typically a quiz, or an assignment, maybe a project, or to write something.

And the application, well, we can't always see how students read we have in our minds, what they're going to do with this outside in their real lives. But maybe, it could be that they reflect and they tell you how they're going to use this information that you've taught them.

So this is my process. First thing I do is I make the modules. All a module is like a cardboard box that holds all of your content, or an envelope that holds. There's nothing much there. It's just the organization tool. Then I create my module entry page. So that's like the front cover of the envelope, where I have an overview of the module, what we're going to study this week. Maybe you could have the objectives for the week. Maybe you could link to each item that they're going to do in that first opening page. That's what I call my warm up or introduction.

Then the content can be pages, files, discussions, assignments, quizzes, external resources. These are the presentation practice and evaluation pieces of the learning unit. And then sometimes I give extra. Like I notice, oh, there's some students who they need a little something more about this specific skill. Not everybody needs it, so I usually have a section header with more practice for those I have some very motivated students and they want more, more, more. Not everybody does, but they do. So I have that kind of separate, so that they can do that.

And then what I'd like to include is a module exit page, something that they can click on, a Google form, or something to reflect themselves, maybe to take a quiz or to tell me how they think they have done so far. They can tell me, but really that is for them to see what they need to do better in the class. So that's my process.

And so to create a learning unit, the first thing I do is create those modules. Left navigation, you click modules. Then you see this number 2, you click on the blue plus, that's on the right, module. And then you type a module name. I often call it like week 1, week 2, week 3. Or sometimes, it's a specific theme that I may get. But most likely, most usually, I use the week number.

And you can lock it until a certain date. And you can add a prerequisite. In other words, you can add that they cannot come into a module or week 2 until they finish certain things in week 1. So it's kind of releasing content. I don't do that honestly, but if you could do that.

So to create a learning unit with modules, you can see I have here-- here's my name, week 6, geography, wonders of the world. And here's where I set prerequisites and requirements. So prerequisites, something they have to do before they can see this content. And requirement, students must complete all of these requirements that they move through a sequential order.

So that might be true in your teaching that you're going very scaffolded that they couldn't jump to the third activity until they really spend more time with the second activity. So you have the option of locking that. What I've been doing is releasing day by day in my modules. I'll show that in a little bit.

The default for Canvas, and probably a lot of learning management systems, when they go in to see their modules, and I used to do this as we see on the left, is the first module you create and make open to students is at the top. Then next week goes under that, and the next week under that. But I figured out that is not the best way. Because then there's a lot of scrolling to get to week 2 and 3 and 4.