Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Renee Ramig: Well, thank you for being here. I scheduled this to do short sharing of some best practices for Canvas. Here to answer questions, have you share things that are working for you in Canvas? And then just give you it's more of a work time so that I'm here, and I could answer questions, but time for you to work on your Canvas classes. So we definitely won't be-- I definitely won't be talking for anywhere near two hours. And I talk so fast like get three times as much and so 20 minutes is really an hour in my presentation.

So I put the link in the chat. It is tinyurl.com/otan2021 to get to this website. It has some distance and hybrid learning resources because that was an earlier presentation I did. It has the Canvas resources. So these are some short video tutorials. Most of them are ones I did for things that teachers need to learn, and then I did a few for students. And then I just included the link to the Canvas community guides which can be overwhelming. But you can find almost everything there that you need.

You just got to get the right keyword when you're searching for it. I put a couple Zoom tutorials, and here is this slideshow presentation that I put in there, as well as just some additional document resources. And if you have resources you want me to add here, so you've got some great campus resources you want me to put, if you throw them in the chat, when I'm done today, I'll add them to this website. So it'll be like active and I can add things that you're using.

So let me go ahead. And so here again is the website address. If you want to go there and download the presentation or just the resources that are there. Here's my email. And if you're like me, sometimes you don't think of the question during the presentation and then like in the middle of the night, like 3 o'clock in the morning, you'll be like Oh why didn't I ask for that. So feel free. I'm really good at answering emails, so feel free to send an email any time. And I'll answer your email probably, not at 3 o'clock in the morning though, but I will answer it, I promise.

So I just want to give you a background on how we started using Canvas. So I work at Mt. Diablo Adult Education. And I only started there about a year and a half, but I've worked in Ed Tech and Teacher Training and Technology in IT for about almost 40 years now because I'm just that old. And when I started at Mt. Diablo in 2019, they had shared with the teachers what Canvas was but it was completely optional. So I think at that time only surg tech happened to be using it, our surgical technology program.

And then in March 16, we had the meeting that basically says the next day the school was going to close and who wanted to start teaching online and who was just going to cancel their programs. And I don't know if anybody was in our previous session, but in the previous session, my dental assistant teachers and I talked about that they decided to offer an online program, literally within a couple of days of the announcement. And we used Canvas. At the time, it was the free version of Canvas, so I'll talk a little bit about that and some of the advantages of going to the paid version. And I'm not getting any Canvas kickbacks for that.

So the two programs that decided to continue to use Canvas and go online, again the free version, was surg tech, who'd already been using it, and then my dental assistant teachers who had never used Canvas before. So they had to learn Canvas, learn Zoom, and figure out how to teach online all within about four days. So that was definitely a challenge. So we didn't know what we were doing with Canvas. I had just been learning Canvas over the past six months that I was at MDAE, and so I was trying to figure it out along with the teachers. So we didn't necessarily make the best choices so as we're using it, we've gone back and made changes. And then we have just adopted the paid version within the last few months. So during the next time, that like the dental assistant starts their next cohort, they'll move from the free version to the paid version.

So what we found, these are just some best practices, what we found was before you start working in Canvas, you need to figure out the files that you're going to have. So for most people, you've been working face-to-face and you've been using physical paper. So if that's the case, you have to figure out what files do I need, and how am I get them into a format that students can use.

So the two generally free formats that students could access are PDF because Adobe Acrobat's free and Google, as long as you ask them to create like a Gmail account, which again, is free. But then you also have to think about, do I want them to fill in these documents? So if you want like a form, again, you have to think who is making that form? Is it a PDF form? Is it a Google form? How are we getting these things into a fillable format? Because you don't want to do-- a lot of students aren't going to necessarily have printers to be able to print things. So you want to try to set things up that allow them to complete it electronically, and if been great it turn into you electronically. So I'll talk a little bit about that, and I noticed a couple of my dental assistant teachers are here, so they can also jump in too.

The second thing we had to think about is how did we want to organize our modules. So there's like timewise-- weekly, monthly. There's subjectwise by concept, and then there's other, which could be like five chapters. So I just want to show you a couple of them. So my dental assistant course is schedule-- is put together by topic. So for example, this one is-- this module's on dental impressions and laboratory materials. The next one is in coronal polish, and then radiology. So they chose to do theirs by topic, and then in that module, they have all their pieces that they need so sometimes they have Google Slides, they might have quizzes, they might have a workbook page do, but it's all within topic.

But then others might do it by week. So our high school program, I know, does all of theirs by timewise. And they put their resources at the top, and then they do their modules by weeks. So the advantage of this is it's really easy to tell where you are because they put the dates right here. The disadvantage is every time you make a copy of this you have to go back and rename all your modules because the dates are going to be different. But it's helpful if you're working with students, especially high school and ESL that need the additional sort of visual of which module are you on now, right?

The other thing you can do is if you-- I don't know how many of you are using Canvas, but these are the publishing buttons, right? So if I click this button, nothing in this-- even though these look like they're on, this took me forever to figure out, these look like they're on but because the module isn't published, the students won't see week one at all. So if I go to my student view, which is helpful when you're working in Canvas, notice my week one isn't there at all, right? So that's another way to help your students is by unpublishing in weeks or topics or assignments that have passed, and they no longer need to access because then they don't see as much when they're logging in. And it's a little bit easier for them to manage. So notice I click this again. So if I go to my student view, I'll now be able to see week one. So super easy to turn something off and on.

So back over here, that's what you need to think of. So what was important, the third one, coordinating with other teachers it's especially important if your teachers are creating multiple classes that the same students are moving from. So for example, high school or dental has multiple teachers working in classes, it's really difficult for students if one teacher decides to do it weekly, and then another teacher decides to do it by subject, right?

So back to what we did to help us look similar is we created sort of layout for high school courses so that they all look very similar. So for example, we color coded our high school courses in blue. So anything, any class that's for high school has this blue bar here, blue text, and a blue banner with the name of the course. We also made sure the home page has all the critical information on it. So if you don't have a home page on your Canvas, I strongly suggest you create a home page and put all your critical information on it with as little scrolling as possible. So for them, they put the dates of the semester, the date and time of the class, a link to their syllabus, their Zoom link, teacher, office hours, and office Zoom link. And then they also created a lounge that has other resources like career transition services, technology videos, the student handbook, things like that.

But every time a student goes into the Algebra 1 Fore class, they always land here on the home page. So you want all your critical information on your home page so they see it first. And if you need to add something then they'll be able to see it right away because it's always the page that pulls up on their home page.

So for example, for my CTEC classes, we made CTEC classes burgundy. So it has-- so you can definitely tell. See the color scheme is completely different, but the important information is still on the home page. It looks different because this isn't high school, but it has her office hours links, it has her class link, it has her email. It has information like you can text between 7:00 AM and 8:00 PM, don't text at 3 o'clock in the morning. And again, she created a lounge that has her other resources at it, like the student handbook and CTEC orientation and videos. And she has those all on her own page.

So again, coordinating with other teachers to make sure your classes look similar, even if you're in the free version and you each have a different log in so you're working separately, make sure you're adding one another as teachers to your courses so you can all see the courses and edit if you need to.

Renee Ramig: And then free versus paid. The biggest difference I find-- so right now my dental course is in the free version. The biggest difference with paid is you have an admin portal and all your courses are in your admin portal. So that's how I can do things like color code it. And organize it in a certain way and create templates all in my paid portal.

And then the other thing in pay that I found really helpful is you can change what your help menu looks like. So for example, we added-- this is my teacher view-- view teacher help resources. Those are videos that we created at Mt. Diablo. And they would click on the link to get there.

Get tech support sends an email to me. Canvas training portal goes to the Canvas site. And then there's ask the community and submit a feature idea.

But for students, they see view student help resources which are the videos we created. So any time we know students are having problems, we can create a short how to video and send them here. And then get tech support, which sends an email to me.

They are not going to see all the other helps, like go to the Canvas community and things that aren't going to be very helpful to them. They're going to see the help resources that they need the most. So in your paid version, you can change what the help button looks like. Which again, I found really helpful.

OK. Any questions so far? Yes. Let me see. Who has their hand up? I think it was Sherry.

Audience: Yeah. Thanks, Renee. So just a quick question. So when you're in the paid version-- which I know we'll be converting to shortly, but-- when you're in the paid version, from the student view or the instructor view, is there like a dropdown menu of fields and options that you can choose from to populate? Is that how that works? Or how do you get those hotlinks? Are you just creating them and making your own hotlinks? Or How's that working?

Renee Ramig: Are you talking on the home page? Like the class link and the Zoom link?

Audience: No. In the help-- so when you went into the help.

Renee Ramig: Good question. So that is a centralized-- an admin thing. So if you wanted-- that's something I did. And it shows up in every single class. So it's not specific to a course. It's specific to every course that is in our portal. That's a good question.

So I can't have a Help menu in surg tech look different than the Help menu in high school, for instance. It's the same help menu. But I could just change-- so it is in the admin portal.

Audience: So they're preset categories in the Help menu?

Renee Ramig: We can make anything we want actually.

Audience: I see. OK.

Renee Ramig: It's been a while. There we go. Help.

So in Help-- this is the Help menu. So I could click a link and I could add a link to google.com and just make them go to Google to go get help. I could add anything I want. Add a custom link, search Canvas guides. But I could add any link I want in my help and then I could reorder it.

And then I could say if this is going to be viewable by students, by teachers. Or if you also use other categories like observers, teacher aides, you can decide which one of these help menus show up for each of the different levels of user that you have in your Canvas organization.

Audience: OK, thank you.

Renee Ramig: Yeah, of course. Other questions? No, I don't--

Audience: Is there a link to show us or a place to go when we're making the page that you're talking about? Information page.

Audience: A home page.

Renee Ramig: Oh, the home page.

Audience: Thank you. It's the home page

Renee Ramig: Yeah. That's OK. I can show you how to create. So a home page is just a page in Canvas that you've designated as home. So I'll show you how to do that. Yeah, it's not hard. That's a great question.

I'm going to make a note so I don't forget. Home page how to. And it's the same in free and paid.

There's not a lot of differences. I think just the centralization of things is the biggest advantage you get in the paid. And then it's also helpful if you're-- if I have any administrators here, in the free version that means you have to be a member of every single class.

If you notice, in my free version-- this is my free version-- when I go to my desktop, because I'm trying to help everybody, I have to be a member of every single class that I'm trying to help with. So my dashboard is like super full. But if you look on my dashboard for the free version, we have 80 something classes. But the only classes I have on my dashboard are the ones that I need on my dashboard because I could get to the other ones through the admin portal.

So I don't have to be a teacher or student in classes to be able to go in and help people or add stuff to classes when you're in the paid version.

Blair Roy: Renee?

Renee Ramig: Yes.

Blair Roy: So we have someone that asked if you can show them how to create a student lounge. And then there was another question that you may be coming to when you get ready to have them work, which is whether or not they can log in to their Canvas to do the exercises that you might have them do. Or whatever you're going to have them do. Thanks.

Renee Ramig: Yeah. So if everybody has Canvas when we get to home pages and stuff, I'll walk you through and I could show you how to do it. So you should have your own Canvas account. And if you don't, I can show you how to create a free Canvas account if you don't already have one create it.

Blair Roy: And can you have the student lounge in the free course?

Renee Ramig: So just so you know, the student lounge is not-- Here, I'll show you. This is the trick for student lounge. OK.

So student lounge is just a single slide in Google Slides. That's what our lounge is. And then all you have to do is change the word-- OK, so this is the slide show. This is the slide show I'm using with you.

If I want to turn this into a lounge, I'd put a picture of my avatar and I'd change this into a link that goes somewhere. So you're just putting cute little pictures on there, you're linking to whatever you want to link to. And then when you're done, you change the word edit-- right there-- to the word present.

And when you do that, it takes out all the stuff around it and you now just have this really nice page. And we just called it the lounge and link to the lounge. So all the lounge is is a Google slide. But you just want one slide, you don't want a bunch of slides like we have on this one.

You just want one slide. And then if you link to something, you'd make another slide show to link to if you want to link. Or maybe you're linking to your student handbook. So you'd have a PDF saved in your Google Drive and you just link to it.

So the trick is to change the word Edit in a Google slide to the word present and then whatever you put on that and then you just link it in your campus account. So super easy, free.

And so if we go back to my-- let me go back to this one. That's my paid one. And let me go back to my lounge. So she just found a background and put these on and then she just found pictures of books and then she just linked to the orientation page. The student handbook, I think is a PDF. Yep. So it's just a PDF that she linked to.

I'm not sure what she linked to for the world. I don't see anything right there. And then you can add-- Oh, she has audio. So you can add audio buttons to your slide and it'll play the audio. And then she linked to video tutorials. Yep. And here's our help tutorials.

Blair Roy: So I think your overview may have answered the question, but we have a question. Purpose of the lounge? And will the students have to have a Google account to see the lounge and click links?

Renee Ramig: Two good questions. So the purpose of the lounge was we have things that we wanted students to just have regular access to, like the student handbook. And the CTAC orientation had some download things for financial aid and things. But we didn't want to make the home page like super, super long. Because a lot of this could have gone on the home page.

So it was for things, plus we're trying to figure out-- we haven't quite done this yet-- how to do a calendar with appointments too. So we're trying to link appointments in there to the lounge. But we just created the lounge maybe two months ago. So we're still figuring things out there.

And then do the students have to have a Gmail account? No. They do not because we make it-- when you go into your Google Slides, you're just going up to share. And then you're getting this link and you're changing the link to anyone with a link can view. And then you copy that link and put that in your Canvas account and then they'll just link to your presentation. Or you can just copy this.

As long as you've set the share to anyone can view, they don't need a Gmail account. Although I got to say, if you have the paid version of Canvas, the integration with Google is really quite nice. So we're asking all of our students, once we move to the paid version, to make themselves a Gmail account. They have to have a Gmail account because we want to use Google Docs with them when they're-- let me see if I can find a technology worksheet.

Student view. Let me see. She has it-- sorry. Let me see if I can find one that is published. Sorry.

Sorry, I didn't create one with that thing. But if you have one, you set up an assignment and you create in the assignment-- sorry-- and you say you want to have them turn something in to you. Oh, you know why? Because that's a page. Well, that's really helpful Renee. OK, hold on.

It helps if I'm on assignments instead of pages.

Audience: Renee, how about dental assisting in our Google slides? We have questions from our Google Slides.

Renee Ramig: I actually wanted something where you were having them turn it in. Let me see if this one has a submission. And she doesn't. OK. Sorry.

I should have had one ready. If you do an assignment and-- here, let me just do a new assignment for you. So I do an assignment. And this is important. This is on one of my slides coming up.

And this is how we really did this wrong when we started. So I've learned. Assignments in Canvas-- if you learn nothing, this is really important-- assignments in Canvas are only for things you're going to grade. If you don't need to grade it, don't use an assignment. Use a page.

A page is just an empty place to type stuff. You could put links, you could put documents, you could put links to discussions, you could put images, you can put video links, anything you want on a page. But it's not graded, which means it's not going to show up in your grade book.

So if you're using Canvas and you have a bunch of stuff in your grade book that you're not grading and you're like, why is all this stuff showing up in my grade book? It's because you used assignments instead of pages. So I find-- let me go back to my dashboard, and then I'll do the assignment.

So if I go back to my dashboard, and I'm just going to pull up this course. This is a course I did for teachers when I was doing a teaching unit. Basically, your units are going to have mostly pages because most of what you're going to be sharing in your course-- at least most courses that I've helped with-- is information.

So you might want to give them links to their homework. You might want to be giving them links to videos they need to watch. You might want to be reminding them of the homework pages they need to be reading. But you don't necessarily need to be grading any of it.

So you notice here, I used text headers. I used pages. I used another text header. Text headers are just used to divide-- if you have a lot in a module, to divide them up and make it easier to read.

And you just click plus. And notice, by default it's an assignment, which is why I think a lot of us do everything as assignments when we didn't know better. At least that's why I did. But you can change here. And you can pick and make it a page or a text header, which is the two most common ones to use. Page and text header.

So I'm going to go back to Assignments real quick. I'm going to make it assignment. I'm going to call this sample. OK and I'm going to make this you have to be turned in to grade. And I'll make it worth 100 points. And I'm going to say that I want this to be a File Upload.

And by default, you probably shouldn't restrict your file types because if you say only PDF, it sometimes messes up even if a student is trying to upload a PDF. So I usually just say if you want them to upload anything, just pick File Upload. Then I'm going to save and publish it. And I'm going to show you what that looks like as a student.

So as a student, I would click Submit Assignment. And notice, right here, I could upload a file if it's on my computer. But if I have a Google account, I just click Google Drive and now I can select anything in my Google Drive to upload to be graded by the teacher. The advantage of this-- which is really cool, which is why I say, if you're going to use the paid version of Canvas, this is so good-- is when they upload a document for you to grade, Canvas automatically makes sure it's shared with you. So you're not going to get the error that says, you can't read it because the student forgot to share it with you.

So if I click on my Google Drive and I select the file, the teacher is going to be able to see that file regardless of what the sharing is, because it's going to change the sharing for the teacher to see.

Blair Roy: Renee?

Renee Ramig: Yes?

Blair Roy: I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt the flow, but we have a couple of questions from Marin. So once you create an assignment, if it needed to be a page, can you convert it to a page or do you have to start over again? Question one.

And question two is, is that only true for the paid version? And I think that was referring to the integration with Google Drive. Marin, is that correct? Yes.

Renee Ramig: OK. So first let me show you the select the File and then I will answer. I wrote down both the questions. So notice when I-- I'm a student view now. I'm uploading my homework to you that I saved in Google Drive.

It is saying clicking attach will temporarily change the share settings of your file to allow LMS to use it. So the student knows that the share is being changed. I now attach it. And now the teacher will be able to see it.

Even if your school-- our school doesn't give our students Gmail accounts. Even though we use Gmail for our K through 12 students, our adult students aren't giving them. But we ask them all to make Gmail accounts so that we can specifically use Google now that we have the paid version.

To answer your question about the free version, I was told Google works in the free version but I was not able to get it to work. You don't get a lot of live support with the free version, which makes sense, in Canvas.

So I'm sure you can post questions to the Canvas question area. I can't think of the name of it right now. And somebody that uses Canvas might be able to answer you, that uses the free one.

Literally, I just went in and added Google Drive and I said I wanted it to show up for every single class in my paid version. So now anybody that makes a class will automatically just have Google there for uploading their files. The teachers don't have to do anything anymore.

But I read something that it is available in the free version, but again, I wasn't successful in trying to get the free version to work. So maybe there's additional steps that I couldn't figure out.

And then the other question was on pages. So the only way that I know-- but feel free to jump in. I probably have other experts here. If I have an assignment-- so let me just go to my assignment and let me say it is this assignment-- and I decided there is nothing here I want to grade. This is just information and I made an assignment instead of a page, I actually have to highlight everything and copy it, and then go back to pages and make a new page.

So I'm going to view all pages, make a new page, paste it onto the page, name my page. I'm going to save and publish it. And then I'd have a page. So then you could go back to your assignment and delete the assignment if you wanted to do that.

But there's no way to just take your assignment and then just make it turn into a page. So I realize if you've been doing everything in assignments, it's going to take you a while to change them all over.

So what we've been doing is when they start a new cohort, we start from scratch. So generally what we do is we go to Settings. You have people here that think really linear. I'll go back to my presentation. I know I'm jumping around.

And I'm going to export this course content. And I could export the whole thing. And it'll have everything in it. You could then put that in a new course and not publish any of it, and just move the stuff that you need when you need it in the course.

So all of your files will be there. All of your old modules will be there. All of your assignments and your pages. And then you could just manually add things when you need it. Because what I found is the first two three four times that you're working in a class, it has enough messiness that it makes more sense to start new each time.

So you're bringing all your stuff in, but you're not using the structure you created before. So I'm going to download this. And I would go here. I'm just going to go into the free version because it's a little bit easier for me to start a course in the free version. And I'm going to do-- OK.

So let me say I'm going to do a new dental assistant course. And I want to go to Settings and I want to import what I just brought in. So I want to import my Canvas course. And I want everything in. Because you don't want to [inaudible]. It has a lot of good stuff in it.

If I said to my dental assistant teachers, oh by the way, we're moving to the paid version next time and you can't move anything over, they would probably all just quit right there. It's just not going to happen. So you want to be able to bring your stuff over, but you want to be able to rethink your organization because you didn't know what you were doing when you first did it. At least I didn't.

It's downloading the content. I don't even remember what I downloaded here. Sorry. OK. Let me see. OK.

So notice, this has the home page. This was a blank class I just made. It added the home page, it added all your modules in here. And it came in the same published mode it was that I exported it.

So I would basically take all of these, unpublish them all, and start with a brand new module and call this-- I'm going to call this week one. I know they don't work on weeks, but just to start.

And then I might say, OK, during week one I want to use-- I'm going to move this to the top because this is my week one. Sorry. I went too far up. I'm going to move week one up to my module.

So I'm starting again with week one because I want to reorganize it. And let's say, I still want this text header. All I have to do now is move that up and it will be in my new module. Well, it should be. Why are you not there? There we go.

And then I also want this page. So I can move that up. And it's not being-- there we go. It's not cooperating.

So I can use anything that I had before. But let's say this assignment, it really was supposed to be a page. So I don't want to move that up because I want it to be a page. So I would go here and copy this and I would go back to week one. And I want to create a brand new page and I'm going to name it-- I don't remember what it was, sorry. And then I'm just going to paste in that content that I just got that was an assignment, but now I want it as a page.

And so now I have that in my module. So you've got your content here that you exported from your previous course, but you're creating new modules and dragging things into it. It is a great way to start if you find the course you have needs a lot of changes, because I find that quicker than trying to change things that you're publishing at the same time. It's really hard to do that.

So let me go back here and make sure that I haven't-- because I've been jumping all around.

Blair Roy: So Renee, we have a couple of comments.

Renee Ramig: Absolutely.

Blair Roy: And if I miss a comment, I apologize. Let's see. One was, how do you know if you have the paid version versus the free account? The other question was adding external apps.

Renee Ramig: OK.

Blair Roy: Yeah, and then we have some other things. But go ahead, you want to take those?

Renee Ramig: Sure. Well, that's a really good question. I honestly don't-- I mean, oh. I know exactly how to tell. Sorry.

If your address to your course-- so if you open up your course-- and your address starts with canvas.instructure.com, you're in the free version. If you're in the paid version, you're going to start with whatever your school decided to call your paid portal. So ours is mtdiabloadulted.instructure.com. So again if it starts with canvas.instructure.com, you're in the free version. If it starts with something other than canvas.instructure.com, you're in the paid version.

Then the other question was adding an external app. So there's two ways to do it. In the free version, you do it by course. So you're in your course. I'm in my course called Introduction to teaching Canvas. I went to Settings, and I went to this tab right here called Apps.

And then they have all these built in apps that you could add to it. So let me see if they have Google on here. Yeah they do. They have Google Apps. So I can click this. Let's see. Oh, I need to add Google Assignments. That's where I was having trouble with.

If there's a built in app, you could click Add app. And you have to go to the app that you're doing, like Google, and type in consumer key and shared secret and they'll give it to you. So usually there's somebody to email, a Canvas rep, at the app that you're trying to add and they need to give you something called a consumer key and a shared secret, which is different for every Canvas course.

But I can't give that to you. That's from the app. But the Google LTI is this page. Here I'll put this in the chat. And this will walk you through how to add the Google to your Canvas course.

So again if you're using free, unfortunately you have to do this with every single course that you create. If you're in the paid version, whoever your admin is could do this once and it'll show up in every single course that's created in your portal.

So let me put this in my-- if I can get to the bottom again. Let me see. Why am I not? There we go. Chat. Of course it's not going to show up there. OK.

The link I just put is called Google LTI and it's for adding Google to any learning management system, which LMS stands for, including Canvas. And again it's free and it should work with the free one. But since we are moving to the paid one I just didn't spend a lot of time trying to get it to work.

If you are using the free one and you really want to use Google and you can't figure it out, email me and I will figure it out for you. And I will create a video of how to do it. Because once I do it for one of you, it will be the same for everybody and then I could just I could just share the video with you.

So if you can't figure it out from this page, going through the Getting Started page, to add it to your Canvas class, again let me know. And if you're in the paid one, your admin has to do it because-- you can do it on your course though, unless your admin has blocked the ability to do it on your course in the paid one. But if you want it to show up on all your courses automatically, admin has to do that.

Blair Roy: OK, Renee are you ready for another one?

Renee Ramig: Absolutely.

Blair Roy: You've got some great--

Renee Ramig: That's what this is for.

Blair Roy: Great questions coming through. So now someone made the comment that if you back up that course and restore it as a new course, you're going to have a mess of your grade book if you do that.

Renee Ramig: Hold on. Let me go back to my dashboard. Which one was I in? I was in my free one, sorry. And I closed it up. Let me get back to it.

Blair Roy: Don't you love LastPass?

Renee Ramig: Yes. I would never remember my passwords without LastPass.

Blair Roy: Oh my gosh.

Renee Ramig: I don't remember what the course is that I just did unfortunately. Did I even name it?

Audience: I think you named it dental something.

Renee Ramig: OK. Let me see. Thank you. It might be-- yeah, because I imported it. I don't know. Let me see. I don't think that one's it.

I thought when I imported it-- let me just do this. Go ahead and ask the next one. I am going to go to my dashboard and just make a new course and re-import it and see what happens, because I can't remember. So I'm going to make a new course. I'm going to call it check for grades.

Create a course. Go to Settings. And I'm going to import and re-import the course. I thought it did not include the grades, but we'll see in a second. What's another question?

Blair Roy: Another question is, is the only reason to use-- let's see. So one reason to use pages is to not clutter your grade book. Any other reasons to use pages over assignments? I think is what Francis wanted to know.

Renee Ramig: OK. Good question. So let me show you. I'm going to go back there in a second, so I'm just going to pick this one.

Blair Roy: And then Liz Flynn commented-- really good comment-- it kind of helps the student know that there's something to turn in if it's assignment, as opposed to a page, which maybe is just consuming content.

Renee Ramig: I'm going to create a new assignment here. When I do an assignment, you have the name of the assignment in the text box. That's the same as pages. You have to name your page and put your content on page. And this bar is the same whether it's a page or an assignment.

So you can type bold, italics. You can add an external link. You can add images. You can add audio files. You can add documents. You can connect to your Google Drive and add Google Drive links. And this is Commons, which I wasn't going to talk about today.

The difference is down here. So none of this is here on pages, which I'll show you. So on an assignment, you need to give it some kind of points because you're grading it. You can leave it zero, but if you're going to have zero points, you might as well do a page.

You also need to decide what group you're going to put it on for grading. So I'll show you groups in a minute. Then you need to decide how you're grading it.

Are you grading it by a percentage? Are you grading it by the number of points? Are you just giving it a letter grade? Do you have a GPA scale that you've added? How are you grading it?

Then you have to decide if you're going to require a submission. So as somebody said, yes, if you want them to upload something, it has to be an assignment because you can't upload anything to a page. But not everything you're grading is necessarily going to have an upload.

For example, our dental teachers have a physical paper workbook that the students use. And they don't always make them take a picture of the pages and upload it. Sometimes they just have them hold it up during Zoom time. Or they'll check it when they're in class and then they come and grade it. So in that sense they wouldn't need to submit anything to get their grade.

But if they wanted to submit a file, you would put online and then submit a file. You can also decide if you only want them to upload it once or if they can reupload more than once, which would replace the file if they reupload it. I have not used peer review. And then you could decide who you're assigning to, which actually they have this to pages too.

But they do not have dates. So you can do a due date for the assignment. And when it's open and when it's closed.

And since I'm here, let me just tell you some advantages and disadvantages of doing that. If you put a due date, it'll show up on the students to do list. I'm going to go into-- oops. Sorry. Let me come back here.

Go to science. Go to student view. And notice there's a bunch of to dos right here. That's because I know this teacher in surg tech puts due dates for every assignment. So if there's a due date for your assignment, it's going to show up in the to do.

Now you do not have to put a to do date. So the advantage I found of to do dates, is that it shows up in to do list. The disadvantage of to do-- let me just pick one-- of a to do, is if you have a student that needs to do it, but you don't want it to be late, you have to go in and add that student separately and then make a different date for that student. Otherwise, it's going to show up as late. OK, maybe that's not a big deal.

The other thing to think about is, do you want it to only be open for a certain time which has nothing to do with due date. So if the due date was due tomorrow and they turn it in the day after tomorrow, it's going to be late. But maybe you're going to have it available from two weeks ago until a week from now. So it'll still be late if they put it in two days from now, but they'll still be able to see it.

Again if you do the available dates and somebody needs to access it later, you're going to have to go back to your assignment and change those dates by adding that student separately. So some of my teachers choose not to do any dates when they're creating assignments. Some only do the due dates and always have it available. As long as it's published, it'll show up.

So it kind of just depends on how you want your assignments set up. I just wanted to show you back to assignments for a minute. Do I have any-- what am I in? Sorry. OK.

So in assignments, you need to grade on something. So most people are going to have categories. So when you do your assignment, you have to decide what category it's going to be in. And you don't want to create new categories. You want to think ahead of time, what are the things I'm grading on? Just like a real grade book. It's a grade book.

In this one, they're grading on quizzes, assignments, and class participation. Now you can have 0% categories. Let's say you have practice tests and you want to grade it, but you don't want them added to the final grade, you can create a category called practice test that's worth 0%.

We did that in the dental class. We made a 0% category for practice tests. But you need to decide. So back to Assignments, you were asking me, what are the biggest differences? You have to know your category.

You have to know how many points it's worth. You have to know how you're grading it. You have to know, if you're going to have a submission, what kind of submission you want to allow. You have to decide if they can upload once or more than once. And then decide if you want a due date and when it's available.