Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Johanna Gleason: So, everybody, welcome and thank you for coming. My name is Johanna Gleason. And this is Chris Vela Che. We work together at San Diego College of Continuing-- San Diego College of Continuing Education. Together, we co-chair our Teachers Using Technology, TUT Committee. And so we run trainings and workshops and meetings generally to help teachers with their technology needs, to answer questions they have, to demonstrate things and to find out, you know, we try to, as much as we can-- I wouldn't say I'm great at this-- keep our finger on the pulse of what's going on, try to stay ahead of people so that we can be prepared to answer questions that teachers might have about technology and what to use.

So today, we're going to be talking, for the most part, about grading aspects in Canvas or record keeping aspects in Canvas. But we will look at Canvas more generally. And we'll talk a little bit about how using certain practices in Canvas can help engage our students. And then we will also talk a little bit about accessibility if we've got enough time at the end. And before we launch into the presentation, Chris, could you want to start?

Crhis Vela Che: Yes.

Johanna Gleason: There we go.

Crhis Vela Che: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Chris Vela Che. And I'm co-presenting with Johanna Gleason. As she was saying, we are both coordinators of our Teachers Using Technology in our district. And well, we are here just to go over some specific areas in the Gradebook. Well, actually not specific areas. But we're just going to be talking about, in general, the Gradebook, the SpeedGrader, and whether you use it or not, it's a great feature to explore. In case you have maybe higher level students or even at a beginning, low level, EESL students, you can still assign some homework and grade them.

So I think we can go to the next slide.

Johanna Gleason: I wanted to ask really quick before we start talking about-- well, I guess this is the question, how many people are active Canvas users? So this is new. This morning, when we were doing another session, we learned that a lot of people don't use Canvas. So yeah, do you use Canvas?

Speaker 2: No, I'm looking to use Canvas.

Johanna Gleason: You're looking to use Canvas.

Speaker 2: Instead of Google Classroom for our Adult Education.

Johanna Gleason: Interesting. And folks who are in the chat or sorry, who are on zoom, can you raise your hand if you're active Canvas users or if you're not, can you let us know what you're hoping to get from this session? So that was interesting to me to hear that some people here are considering using Canvas and some people are not using Canvas yet. This is not really an introduction to Canvas. But I will be very happy if anybody needs or wants to go over some Canvas basics so that we can show you how it works. OK, so I'll turn it over to Chris to lead the rest topic. Yeah?

Crhis Vela Che: Yes. So we only have two people here in our Zoom, in our in-person class, so we'll just probably just talk with our audience here in person one by one. But in the chat, we would like you to share your job title and your general experience. Well, if you're using the Gradebook, you know what has been your general experience, do you have experience using it, do you have zero experience, and one challenge using the Gradebook in Canvas.

Johanna Gleason: So yeah, I'm seeing in the chat that we have other people who are not Canvas user. They're interested in learning more. They don't-- they don't know a lot about it. So we might need to do [muffled voice].

Crhis Vela Che: Yeah. We're Going to have, yeah, adjust our lesson to basic because-- yes, we will have to, yeah, talk about--

Speaker 2: For me, you don't need to adjust it to basic. I want to see the details because I'm using the Gradebook that you-- it's not really Gradebook in Google Classroom. So, I want to be able to see the details, what can you do in Canvas that you can't do in Google Classroom.

Johanna Gleason: OK. All right. What do you teach?

Speaker 2: I teach science, but I'm also-- in my district, I create all the adult student account, student Google accounts and maintain those as well. So I wear a couple hats.

Johanna Gleason: So if you moved to Canvas, you would be like creating and maintaining the student accounts also?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So we would pull over the student accounts from our Google accounts into Canvas.

Johanna Gleason: OK.

Speaker 2: Which I presume is something-- I know, I understand that Canvas works pretty well with Google accounts, correct? So--

Johanna Gleason: Yeah. There are integration options, for sure. I don't use any of them. But yeah. OK. And the rest of the audience-- Yeah.

Chris Vela Che: I would just say for myself because I use Canvas in the past. And I learned from the Gradebook how not to do it.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah.

Chris Vela Che: I made some mistakes, and, oh, yeah, I'm not going to do that way anymore.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah.

Chris Vela Che: So it has to do with how you input stuff in, and assignment dates, and things like that.

Johanna Gleason: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that Canvas is great. The Gradebook and the grading options are great because what they can do is prompt students to do things that they might not otherwise do if you set things up correctly. So yeah.

Chris Vela Che: Or the students cannot do anything. And then you have a Gradebook.

Speaker 2: The further question I had is like, from the admin perspective, is it pretty easy for all teachers on your Canvas to send their grades to the admin so they can see what they are?

Johanna Gleason: So that actually is not something I'm going to be talking about today. But the short answer is kind of no. When you download the Canvas Gradebook, if you need to email it to an admin as an attachment, it typically triplicates. And that is annoying to, I think, the teachers who are looking at it because it doesn't look--

Speaker 2: The question is, how do you submit grades?

Johanna Gleason: OK, so we don't have to where we work. We're graded or ungraded, like it's pass/fail, basically. I worked at San Diego State. And I don't know because I'm not an admin. But yeah, I could-- there was a set of instructions I would follow, and it moved my grades straight from Canvas into there. They were using at the time-- Yeah. What do you call it?

Speaker 2: SIS system.

Johanna Gleason: Yes. Yes. And so it was a set of steps I had to follow. Once all my grading was done, it probably took me about five minutes. And it uploaded them as a batch. And it was very easy. So I can't tell you how to do that. But as a teacher--

Speaker 2: Well, as I just needed to know that it can be done.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah. And I don't know what you have to do on the back end to get it ready. But it was super easy from the perspective of a teacher. Yeah. OK. And I'm seeing some questions that are kind of specific in the chat about how to use Gradebooks for specific assignments and how to find work that students have submitted that you can't open.

So I think what we're going to do is leave some time at the end so that we can do some individual troubleshooting with people.

Chris Vela Che: Right. Troubleshooting. Yes.

Johanna Gleason: OK. All right. So these are the things we have planned to talk about, taking attendance in Canvas, grouping and waiting assignments. And that's something you need to do to make sure that your Gradebook looks nice, using the SpeedGrader, which is super easy, annotating on student assignments, which is not applicable only to writing assignments but anything that they submit that's a document or a PDF that you can look at, you can make comments directly on, creating rubrics.

And then we might look at something-- we might leave the accessibility out actually, depending on how many questions everyone has, I think. We'll play it by ear. OK. So I'm just going to start off by talking about taking attendance in Canvas. Attendance does not automatically appear on your Canvas menu. You have to enable it in Navigation. And I'll go through the steps for how to do that. First of all, you go, you can see here, to Navigation. I'm going to drag the Attendance up to the whatever it is people can see.

I'll give a quick demonstration. And then once it's on your menu, you just open it up, you can project this in class and show your students. And you can take attendance on live while you're there. And one of the reasons that I love this is that when I start taking attendance in class, especially if I'm teaching a remote class, when the students see me doing it, they perk up, they start paying attention, they start typing in chat, they start answering, unmuting themselves and answering, and they turn their cameras on. They want me to know they're there when they see that I'm taking attendance.

So to get to the attendance, you've got to go to your Settings. Can everyone see my cursor moving around? OK. I don't want to be annotating stuff. It gets complicated, but yeah. So click on your Settings, open up your Settings, and then you're going to go up here to Navigation along the top. We've got course details open. We're going to go to Navigation. And then you're going to go down here and find Attendance.

Here it is. And you can either just drag it up to the top or you can click on these three dots and click Enable instead. But now, it's up here in the course navigation. I can see it there. And you've always got to remember, with Canvas, to go down to the bottom and Save. I do that all the time, if you exit the screen without saving, it doesn't matter that you dragged it up there. It won't be there anymore. So you save it, go back home. And now it appears in your Navigation. Click on Attendance. And there's your roster. And so as I said, I use this a lot with the online students. And when they start turning on their cameras and unmuting themselves. But I've used it also with fully in-person classes. I've used it with-- I taught at San Diego State University. I used it with my business writing students. These were like sophomores and juniors, credit bearing courses. And I use it with my in-person students also.

So they all see their names, right, while you're taking attendance. And a green check mark means they're present. A red X means they're absent. And you can also mark them late. The orange button makes you know that they're late. And so they all see you there when you're taking attendance. And I'll totally have students like run up to me after class to say, hey, I think you might have marked me absent. So it really does-- It makes them aware that you're paying attention to them.

It's so funny because I think we're always paying attention to our students. But they think sometimes that we don't. I mean, have students halfway through the semester saying, oh, teacher, my name is Khadijah. And I'm like, I know. But I think they kind of feel invisible in class sometimes. So it just lets them know that you're paying attention. And as I said, all those black screens, all those muted students, when I start doing this, I totally get unmuted students, I totally get their videos turned on. And it does really make them interact with me a lot more. So before we move on, any questions about Canvas attendance.

Speaker 2: And that integrates with your SIS system? Whatever--

Johanna Gleason: I don't know about that.

Speaker 2: You don't know?

Johanna Gleason: I kind of doubt that it would, to be honest.

Speaker 4: Let's google it.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah. She's like, we can Google it. Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm not an admin. So I can't really answer a lot of those questions. I doubt it. As I said, when I had to upload my grades, it wasn't up-- they weren't integrated. It was an upload that I had to do. And we, where we work now, you can use-- the reason I use this in Canvas now is just to show the students, it's more like a communication tool with them. We actually submit our attendance differently with our SIS. Is that that's what-- That's what Canvas Solutions is? It's an SIS. PeopleSoft is an SIS?

Speaker 2: That holds the official--

Johanna Gleason: Yeah. So this is not official.

Speaker 2: And that just stands for Student Information System.

Johanna Gleason: Right. OK Yeah.

Speaker 2: I do something similar. I create a Google Doc and my students type in there, for the role. But when I officially put in the role, I have to go into our student information system and do that.

Johanna Gleason: And we have to do that too.

Speaker 2: But it'd be really great if you just did it once and it moved it over.

Johanna Gleason: There might be a way of doing that. I don't know. I don't know. You might need to get on the phone with the Canvas admin folks and talk about an integration and get permission from your district to do all that stuff. OK. All right. So grouping and weighting assignments. I'm going to probably take a quick detour here. I'm going to go back to Canvas. Can you all-- everyone at home, you see my Canvas Course? Everybody who's on Zoom, can you see that?

OK. All right. So over here on our Navigation, we have things-- in fact, I guess I have things that aren't showing, right? We have this Assignments page here, so you can click on Assignments, and you can add assignments into your course by clicking on the plus sign over here or by clicking on Add Assignment up here. Both are ways to add assignments. OK? You can decide how many points you want those assignments to be.

You can decide that maybe you don't want them to be points. You want them to be a percentage or on a 4.0 GPA scale or complete incomplete. They can even be non-graded assignments. So you have a bunch of options as far as those are concerned. You can decide how you want the students to submit the assignments. So I'm an ESL teacher. Sometimes I want them to write something. And in that case, I'll usually request that they do a text entry. Sometimes, I want them to record themselves speaking so I can listen. And in that case, I'll request that it be a media recording.

Sometimes, they need to create a Google Doc or a Word document, and then they'll upload it to Canvas later so that I can grade it. So you can choose those things, whatever it is that you want. You can set a due date. OK. Pretty typically, I don't set due dates for my students, but one of the great advantages of setting due dates is that it makes it appear on the student calendar. And they get reminders on their home page that something is coming up. OK? So they don't have to go look for assignments.

They don't have to go into their modules. They just get when-- they log into Canvas, it's on to their to-do list, it's on their front page, and it lets them know that they need to do that. You can also make things available from a specific time to a specific time. So I've done things like that with my in-person classes. I want them to take a test in class with me. I make it available from the date and time that that class starts. And I end it on the date and time that that class ends. That way, I know that they're all doing it in class while I'm there watching them.

There are lots of options as far as that's concerned. Maybe you want to give them a week to do it. Yeah, and I've done that too. They're doing-- You mentioned vessel. They're writing resumes. They're doing job research, job search research. They might need a week or something to do that. So anyway, you have options there. So once you've created your assignment, you're going to make sure you put Save and you probably want to put, Save and Publish if you want the students to see it.

I don't publish everything right away. Like, sometimes, I only publish things later. But again, don't forget. That's a thing that's pretty easy to forget. You've got to remember to click Save, otherwise it's just going to completely disappear. And I need an assignment otherwise.

Yeah, it's not going to save it for me. Oops. And look, let's-- can we just delete this now. I don't know that. I better put one in there. Now, it won't delete it. This is an old course we're doing now. Yeah, there we go. OK, so this is an assignment that we've added. You can also add quizzes. If you'd rather it be a quiz than an assignment. And quizzes, again, I wasn't really prepared to go over quizzes. But when you're adding quizzes, you have your main assignment and where you'll give instructions.

Here's my quiz. Here are my instructions to the students. And down here, I can set-- if I want them to have a time limit, if I want to shuffle the answers. One of the things I like to do because my assignments are low stakes and I teach non-credit and it's not graded, I like to allow multiple attempts because I want the students to practice as much as they want to practice. But you can decide that or not. If you do allow multiple attempts, you can keep the highest grade or the latest grade or you can keep an average of all of their grades.

And then so you have another variety of options, again, you can set due dates. So that's just the information about the quiz. But then this is where you start answering or you start providing your quiz questions.

Speaker 2: Can you import like a Google Form?

Chris Vela Che: No. No. I tried multiple times.

Johanna Gleason: But once the quiz is in there, you can reuse it as much as you want. You can reuse it and you can edit it. OK, so again, so we've got multiple choice. But you have a bunch of options here. True, false. Fill in the blank. Fill in multiple blanks. There's a whole lot of options for the type of quiz question you want. And you can also have them do text.

So this is where it would be like maybe an essay question. But if you want them to write an essay instead of having them upload a file or attach a Word document, you can have them write their essay or write their text right here in the quiz and grade it right there, which can be nice. OK. I don't know if it's going to let me save this. But--

Chris Vela Che: I was going to say something about the doc because I've done this, which is integral upload a document like a Google Doc, but that would be on their Assignment. It's not necessarily in quizzes.

Speaker 2: I know I could give a link to a Google Form, but I want to be able to pull in the score from the Google Form.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah. I don't know about that.

Chris Vela Che: I tried multiple times.

Johanna Gleason: Canvas has lot of integrations. OK. But that might be because your school isn't integrated.

Chris Vela Che: No. I was working with a Canvas administrator trying to pull stuff in and work on that. And because I had all those Google Docs and forms and

Johanna Gleason: That you want to reuse.

Chris Vela Che: Yeah. And there's no way.

Johanna Gleason: There's no way to do it. OK. Is it possible that there's an integration with Microsoft?

Chris Vela Che: I don't know. I didn't try Microsoft. Google was a no go.

Johanna Gleason: Not that I know of, but-- OK, so that's how you're adding assignments and adding quizzes. But if you want, if you're going to be using it to grade, you're going to want to wait. You know, we have a syllabus, right? Maybe the final exam is going to be worth 25% of the overall grade. Maybe the written assignments are going to be worth 50% of the grade. You're a science teacher. You have labs they have to write. That's going to be a certain percentage.

So in order to do that, you've got to group your assignments and then you've got to wait the final-- you've got to wait each group. OK. So basically, that's what we're doing here. We're going to add groups of assignments. We're going to decide how much, what percentage that group is worth for the final grade. And then you look at all of your groups, make sure they add up to 100%. And then you don't have to do the math. Canvas does all the math for you. Once you set up those assignment groups, you can create new assignments and make sure that you move them into the group you want them in.

If you already created assignments before you set up your groups, that's fine. You can just move the assignments you have into groups. And, you know, if you've got assignments there. And you're like, you know what, I don't want those to count for the overall grade. You can delete them or you can put them into a group that's worth 0%. So I'll give you another quick demonstration of how to do that in Canvas without a question in chapter. Thanks, Chris. That was just you. All right. I had a link to-- OK. Nope, that's not it.

I thought I had a Canvas. Was ready for that. But I'm going to have to grab a course. Sorry, poor preparation on my part here.

[chatter]

Speaker 4: Well, I'm just curious. She kept saying about like, that 0%, because I've created assignments where, like, maybe I'm over expecting my students to finish. And some of them finish, but others don't finish. So like, the majority of them have a zero, right? So how can I move that into a 0% or it doesn't count towards their overall grade because she was saying something about maybe bringing it into a zero category or something like that.

Johanna Gleason: So we can add groups. So we'll say, for example, let's say final exam.

Speaker 4: Right.

Johanna Gleason: We've got a final exam, that's one group. We've got another group, which is classwork, right? We've got another group which is homework, right? And maybe we'll say we also have places. So I'm clicking on group, and I'm creating different groups quizzes. This is an assignment. OK? And then when I scroll down and I look at all of my assignments in Canvas, I've got these groups down here that are empty, right? These groups are empty. So I want to start moving some of my assignments into these groups. OK?

So I'm going to move this to Quizzes and Assignments. I'm going to move this to Quizzes and Assignments. I'm going to move this to Quizzes and Assignment.

Chris Vela Che: And by the way, I teach the beginning literacy level, ESL. So you can imagine we don't use-- I don't use grades that much in my class because of the low literacy levels. And we just use for a place to get information and just do a couple-- you know, just two discussions there. But if you have, you know, but it's doable to do all of this regardless of the level of your students. It's a great tool to use, especially for grouping all of these activities and having a all the Gradebook and showing at the end of your course all the students activities and their progress. So it is a great tool. However, I don't group homeworks or assignments.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah. OK. So once you've got your groups in there, you're going to go back up here to the top and click on that menu with the three dots and go to Assignment Groups Weight. OK. Weight final grade based on assignment. OK. Click on there. And you're going to decide how much you want each of these groups to be worth. So I'm going to say I want my-- look at all these assignments. I'm going to have to move those around. OK. Let's say I want the discussions to be worth 25%.

I want the quizzes to be worth 25%. I want the assignments to be worth 25%. And I want-- I'm going to have to add in some other things there. The speed-- Yeah, well, for right now, just, yeah, I'll go with the live sessions will be worth 2.5%. OK all right. And then when I scroll down, you can see everything in here is worth 0% of the total. So if you put any assignments into this group and your students complete them, even if they're worth 30 points, 30 points, whatever it is, that is not going to show up in the final grade calculation.

So you can have them do it just for practice, but it's not going to harm or hurt their grade if they do it or don't do it.

Chris Vela Che: But we have to create a group first for that.

Johanna Gleason: You've got to create a group first.

Speaker 4: So can we do the assignment, realize people aren't doing the assignment, put it into a group, and then move them all into a group to get them off our--

Johanna Gleason: You don't want to be moving them in and out of groups after students have started submitting work because it messes up-- the student will see their grade calculation changing wildly. And they won't understand why. And you're going to have to answer a lot of questions about it. So I would not advise that you make any changes. I would advise that you set up your groups before your class starts and then you can create more assignments in the groups after class has started. But I wouldn't change assignments.

I wouldn't move them into different groups because you'll just get-- I've done that because I've made mistakes. And then I've had students say, oh, my god, teacher, my grade went from 88 to 37. What happened? And that's because I was moving things around. And similar things can happen. In Canvas, the default for Canvas Gradebook is that if a student hasn't submitted assignment, the grade calculation is done without that assignment. So that unsubmitted assignment is not factored into the average, the grade average.

Speaker 4: Unless you set it, right?

Johanna Gleason: Unless you set it.

Speaker 4: You set it to 0 automatically, tell it no, it's not.

Johanna Gleason: Exactly. And so that's a thing like if I'm teaching my class all semester, and I haven't set it, like you said, my students are going to think they're doing great. And now I have to calculate my grades, I stick that in there. And now everyone's failing. But that's not a fair thing to do to your students, right?

Speaker 4: So that's number one, because when originally when I used Canvas, I didn't do that. So everybody had a really high percentage. And they were missing stuff. But now, after practice, I make sure I set it, if you haven't submitted, you get a 0.

Johanna Gleason: Yes.

Speaker 4: That way students know what they're missing and they know their exact grade.

Johanna Gleason: The same thing happened to me. I learned it when we went online with no notice and no training. And that's how I learned not to use grade. OK. All right. So I'm going to actually stick a few things into my final exam, because the reason that some of these groups weren't showing up is that they don't have anything in them. There was-- OK, 25, 25.

Chris Vela Che: There's something in the chat. But I see something here in the chat. I wonder if that's-- Yeah, is it-- because I don't see anything. Is there any--

Speaker 4: There's a Patty.

Johanna Gleason: No. Nobody's writing in the chat. No. I've been-- I've been answering the chat questions.

Chris Vela Che: OK.

Johanna Gleason: OK. So then once you've set up your assignments, if you go back to the Gradebook. And honestly, I kind of hate Canvas Gradebook because, well, I'll show you why. Like, look at how long it is. And you cannot see the whole Gradebook at one glance. You have to see how long it takes to go through all of this stuff. OK, well, Chris, continue the filters.

Chris Vela Che: In a second.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah. OK. But I'm going to get-- I'm going to I'm going to, like, delete all of those zeros in just a second. But what you'll see if you go to the end is the grades that are worth 25, like, the overall look that's worth 25%, those are the assignments that are carrying weight and that are affecting their grade overall.

So let me just go back into the assignments and delete out all of those 0% assignment groups. OK, so where are my assignments? I've lost them now. Way down there. Way down there. This might take too long to do as 25, 25, 25, 25. Included assignments. I said, move me to another group. And then let's put some of these down here.

Classwork and Homework. So I want-- So now if I go back to my grades, it's so long and really annoying. And yes, you can apply those filters. So because now look, I've still got-- I'm such an idiot. OK. Well, I'm not going to do it right now, but basically, you can scroll to the end and you can look at the assignment groups that actually bear weight in the class. You don't have to look at all of the assignments altogether.

OK. I'm going to leave it at that. Do we have questions about grouping and weighting assignments?

Speaker 4: Can I just ask for clarification if you have, let's say your 100 assignments and you have these different points, are they loaded-- Are they on there twice? Like in group final exam and then somewhere else? Are they only in the final exam?

Johanna Gleason: Can you ask again? Sorry.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll ask again. OK. So let's say I have say hi to a dog. That's an assignment. And that's in the final exam. Is it only located in the final exam. It's not-- It's not somewhere else in the grade book?

Johanna Gleason: Well, you have to put it where you want it. So if you put it in final exam, you shouldn't duplicate it and put it anyplace else.

Speaker 4: But it wouldn't be in two places, like in terms of when it was assigned versus it's a final exam? Like sometimes when you create it, then you create it for this day, but then it goes into that group category.

Johanna Gleason: Things only go into the group category if you put them in the group category.

Speaker 4: OK. OK.

Johanna Gleason: So if I'm going back to my assignments and looking here at my assignments. So, you know, you can see, I've got these assignments that are in these 25% categories.

Speaker 4: Right.

Johanna Gleason: But let's say-- Yeah. So they're only in the one place where you put them.

Speaker 4: OK. Perfect.

Johanna Gleason: They're only in the one place where you put them. You can move them, right? So maybe I've decided, OK, you know what. I was going to have discussions be 25%, but I don't really want to have a discussion group anymore, so I'm going to move that to homework. OK I'm going to call that homework. Move this one to homework.

Chris Vela Che: And that's regardless of the date you created it.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah. It doesn't matter what date you create it. Now because I don't have anything in homework, I'm going to say I don't really need to have discussions be 25% anymore. But I put some stuff in homework, so I want that to-- why is it not. There it is. OK, but I put some stuff in homework. So I want that to be worth 25%. Don't do this after you start class. If you do this after you start class, you're going to mess up your student grades.

Chris Vela Che: Right.

Johanna Gleason: But yeah, so now and I could actually-- I could completely delete that assignment group now. But yeah, it doesn't matter what date you create it. But if you create an assignment. And you don't put it in a group-- Let's see. Create assignment.

Speaker 4: [overlapping voices].

Johanna Gleason: OK.

Chris Vela Che: I wonder what the default is if you don't save it to a--

Johanna Gleason: I think-- that's what I'm testing right now. I think it's just going to-- it's not going to be in a group. But let's go back to the assignments and see.

Chris Vela Che: And Zoom, as we're troubleshooting here or not troubleshooting.

[interposing voices]

Johanna Gleason: Look at that. They put it in Quizzes. OK? So I created a new assignment and it put it in Quizzes because I didn't specify. So you need to specify when you create an assignment where you want it to go. OK? Create an assignment. We'll do test here. And then down here, blah, blah, blah, test, blah, blah, blah, test. And because that was the default here. So I've got to choose a place to put it. I've got to choose a place to put it.

If I don't choose a place, it's going to choose for me. It's going to choose whatever the default is. So if you want to make sure that it's in the right place, make sure you're looking at that assignment group and you put it in the right place. So I don't want that to be in Quizzes. I wanted that to be in homework. And now I'm going to go down here and say, OK, that was a good question. Thank you. It helped me to understand what I was saying.

Do you have assignment tabs on the right available for your students or do you embed all activities in modules. So personally, I-- I hide almost all of the navigation from students. So if you look at my course here, and we'll go back home, you can see over here. And I don't know why badges are enabled. I didn't mean to enable those. But all of these things where it says that there's that eye think through it, that means the students can't see it. I can go to the student view up here.

And so if I'm a student logging into my class, the only options I have to go look at are badges, which I'm going to delete-- I don't know how that got there. Grades and Syllabus. And I think I haven't published any assignments yet in this course, which is why students can't see it. So once I publish them, they'll see them. But what will happen is under this to-do list, the things I publish for students will appear here. And that's where they click on to go do them.

So, yeah, like, yeah.

Speaker 4: I don't-- I think when there's a lot of things for the students to choose from, if they can choose all those different things, quizzes and pages and assignments and all kinds of other things, I think they get confused. But once you published assignments, yeah, that's-- let me stop the student view. OK. I don't think I have any published assignments in here. This is the problem, right. I never publish it. And I don't know, there's published assignments, so--

That's weird. I wonder-- I guess I disabled it. I guess I disabled it in the Settings. So I'll go back down to Settings here. I'll look at my Navigation. I'm going to take Badges out because I don't know why that was in there. And I'm going to go back down here and I can put my assignments back in, which disappeared. I'm not sure why. OK. I don't know if you can disable modules, I don't know. Let's see. So don't forget to save because I always forget to save. And then I go back and I don't understand why it's there. But now if I go home and I click Student View. Oops, that was Immersive View, not Student View.

Now you can see that the things the student-- I guess I enabled Discussions. That was stupid of me. But anyway, badges disappeared. And these are the things that the students can see. Yeah. So I just think, when they have too many options, it gets confusing, they don't know what to do. So get rid of discussions. I don't want that there. And I'm still not sure why announce-- I don't even-- I don't even use announcements. I know a lot of people do. But I don't use announcements. And then--

Chris Vela Che: I think it all depends on the level of Canvas navigation proficiency of your students. If they're able to navigate Canvas with not a lot of problems, then you're encouraged to use the assignment option there, the modules. But for our population, especially at the beginning level, putting a lot of these options can be very confusing and overwhelming for our population of students.

Johanna Gleason: So this is what I usually say. This course I'm showing you, you can see it's from summer 2023 and actually never-- I never used it. I never published it because it was an in-person class, but that's what I would usually have on my Canvas Courses visible for students, home, grades, syllabus, and assignments. And then, pretty typically, we put big buttons on there that they can click on because for the same reason Chris is talking about, if they see great big colorful buttons, it's easier for them to find those and click on those. But yeah, you can play around with that navigation and do it the way that you want to.

OK. So I'm getting lots of questions here. So I can show you-- I'm not sure how to pronounce your name, but I can show you a more contemporary class where you would see what my actual students would see. So dashboard. And-- So this is an example of a class that I'm teaching now. And this is my home page. And the students have these big buttons here They can click on to get to the syllabus to practice English and to do homework.

And then on the corner, on the side here, they've got Home, Grade, Syllabus, and Modules. That's all they can see. And this is a level-- this is a literacy class. A lot of the students don't have digital literacy yet. So when I tell them, when I train them to use it, I just tell them to go to practice English, which actually takes them to Modules. And then they can go through and they can start practicing these activities.

So that's an example of what one of my active class pages looks like. Leave Student View, and I can show you one more active class. So again, Student View. And you can see these guys have a little bit more to choose from. This is a more advanced level class that this is not a literacy class. And this is a mixed level class. So I enable more things for them to see. And then I just got this one, this little link here, click here to practice English.

OK, so back to the presentation. Looks like-- OK, thank you very much. I'm going to turn things over to Chris so that she can talk about using SpeedGrader. OK.

Chris Vela Che: Awesome. So the SpeedGrader is a very nice tool to give students feedback. Basically, when you create an assignment and then you're ready to grade, you have a little section where you can type or annotate on the student, depending on the file of the student's work. So let me see if I can log in to my Canvas here. I don't think I'll have an example here. But yeah, so the SpeedGrader will give you options to annotate students' work and also give them feedback either with text or a video submission.

You can also create, it gives you the option to give, you know, to submit a video. So it is a great tool. Although I can tell you, it is time consuming because if you have 36 students that you need to grade, their homework or assignment, is it the annotations you're looking for. I think that-- no, I was just going to show a little how we look like, just like little section of the SpeedGrader. So then I can point out all the options that teachers can find. So you can either submit a feedback through text on the SpeedGrader or, you know, a video. I tend to use the video option for the SpeedGrader. If they submit a writing assignment.

And that's a little more personalized. But again, if you commit to that, then you have to probably do it for the amount of students that you have. And that can be time consuming. But it's a pretty cool tool.

Johanna Gleason: Yes, I only have two out of two submissions. But you can show the SpeedGrader if you want.

Chris Vela Che: Yes. So here it is. So say your student already submit an assignment. So then you'll go to the into the SpeedGrader and then you'll have up at the top, all the students, and you can go student by student.

Johanna Gleason: And this isn't the greatest example because lots of these students didn't submit this assignment.

Chris Vela Che: And if they haven't submitted what I've done in the past is, all right, so let's check who has submitted the assignment.

Johanna Gleason: You do that in class? Live in class?

Chris Vela Che: Yes.

Johanna Gleason: Well, do you know what else I've done, which is kind of mean, and I've only done it to my credit-- my sophomores and juniors at the University who should know better. I'll give them a 0. And that's because they see their grade drop immediately, they log on. They're like, oh, my god, what happened? And I'm sorry that it gave them a heart attack. But that's all right to me to say, oh, my god, what happened? And I'll say, well, you didn't do your assignment, you know?

But I only do that kind of as a last resort. Like, that's usually after I've emailed them to say, hey, you haven't done this in, are you going to turn it in? I would never do that as a first resort. And I would never do that with my adult student. That's the-- they're business majors, you know?

Chris Vela Che: They should know better.

Johanna Gleason: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Vela Che: Yes. And it's a lot for you.

Johanna Gleason: And I never leave it at the zero. I'm like do you want to make it up. So--

Chris Vela Che: Yes, but it's a good practice. If you want to get students aware of what they're missing in class, and going over, it could be a good way to do that.

Johanna Gleason: Oh, Maria, you didn't turn yours in.

Chris Vela Che: Yes, you can call it. So here's an example of a writing from a student. So then you have options of annotating. And I don't know if you're aware of this toolbar, but you can annotate here. This is the part I was talking about when it's time consuming. If you have 36 students, then you have to annotate. And this could be like tedious work. You know, you have the options to highlight, to insert text in the document, or cross out, or draw something.

So you have plenty of things that you can do on the student's work. And also add a comment. And this is what I was talking about earlier, what I do with my students, I revise, I check. And the work that the work that my students do is very minimal. They have to type my first name is, my last name is, even just with those two sentences, it could be very challenging for the population I have. So if they type that, I make the corrections. And then here, what I will do is I'll write, great job or if you click over here, you can submit a short video of yourself saying, nice job, Mohammed. You submitted your work. Great work.

So that is a little more personalized. But again, how many students you have, so how many videos you have to submit. Short videos though. You can use emojis or these reactions over here, and then reassign the homework. They have to do it again because there were so many mistakes, you can also reassign. So you can do all of this as they are watching you, so they are aware of what they need to do. Or they'll see all of these notes when they log in into their Canvas.

You may have to show them how to look unto your notes and their feedback. But once you annotate here, they'll be able to see your notes. And I think Johanna is doing, yes, a demonstration here. You missed-- you missed a little--

Johanna Gleason: [overlapping voices].

[laughter]

Right. We can put a box around things.

Chris Vela Che: And I don't know, I think one of the-- this gentleman over here mentioned something about Classroom? I forgot your name, sir. Sorry. Aaron. I didn't tell you my name, so you couldn't forget. So what is this in comparison to, like, you know, Google Classroom. Do you have that option in Google Classroom to give feedback with video?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you when you're grading, you can add comments. You can highlight and do like a comment. So you can do comments over on the right just like that or you can highlight something in the text itself and do a comment. If you needed a video or something, you could put the URL to it in the comments. So then you have to put the URL here. If you click on that video, I think it's already integrated. You just need to give permission to your camera and just--