[audio logo] OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Karin De Varennes: Good morning, everyone. Wonderful to see you. My name is Karin De Varennes. I am the Canvas lead here at OTAN with technology projects. And I'm so excited that you're here and here to be with Lynn, who is a very talented person and has been an administrator, an English teacher, and has worked-- and is now working at CDCR.

And so she's just got such a depth and breadth of experience. And I know for me, as a practitioner, that it always means a lot to me. And it makes it more credible when others like myself, who as a practitioner, step up and present, because we know that she understands both our adult education, adult educators, and adult learners. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Lynn.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: Hi, everyone. So yeah, as Karin said, I'm currently an administrator with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. I've been with the department five years. I started as a site-based administrator, so the equivalent of a principal at an adult school, and then moved up to what our equivalent of the district office would be.

And before that, I spent many years in a large local school district as a site-based administrator, a teacher, and then eventually, a district level administrator. And my background in Canvas is much like your own trial by fire. March 2020 came around. We hadn't used any sort of online learning management system at all. And then suddenly, overnight, we had to do it.

And the dynamic that shifted in that carried with me when I came to CDCR, because we were a little bit later than the rest of the world, both in coming out of restrictions from COVID and embracing the need to provide materials to our learners, our staff, and our community in a digital format.

So I really brought Canvas up to speed, where it is now in CDCR, and in helping them look forward to what it means to provide very flexible learning experiences. So whereas an adult school, your learners come, they voluntarily show up to do their work with you, they enroll in their programs, and they have an objective, our students are a little different in that they neither have the opportunity to determine when and how they can attend.

And in many cases, they don't have an opportunity to choose the programs that they're in. So engaging them, and making sure that they are informed as to why it's important that they be involved and engaged is a little different for us. So that's where my background comes from, and where this came from, and why I learned to use Canvas in a way to communicate that maybe you use, and maybe you don't.

But I just wanted to put together some time to talk to folks about what the features are. This is kind of an entry level and then a little bit more advanced on how to communicate with Canvas, but put together some training that either reminds you of what you knew and haven't used in a while, or gives you some new tools. So without further ado, I'm going to try and find out why. There we go. OK.

So it's a 90-minute training. It's a small group today. So I don't know that it will take us that long. But this first part is just the foundations of Canvas communications. We're going to talk about how to leverage Canvas as a communications tool, beyond just sending some text that tells someone something that they need to do.

I am a person who is always a believer in multimodal communication. And Canvas is just one tool in a toolbox that you, as an administrator, have to work with your school. Many times, we look at what we have, and we get kind of in a rut on things. And we say, oh, Canvas is just for this.

But I want to remind you of some ways that you can use Canvas that really, honestly will make it a little more fun for you and your different learner groups, and your different faculty groups however you look at your school community, and how you can tailor messages that help them want to be in your space.

You are the ones that establish, as we've all heard, the culture of your schools and how you communicate with your different stakeholder groups. So if your communication style is the same, you're probably not reaching all of your stakeholder groups at the level that you need to. And so this is also a way that you can learn to tailor some messages to meet those groups' needs and really get them coming back.

So before we go too far into things, I want to tell you our objectives for today. You're going to learn to create and manage announcements for school-wide, community-wide and course-specific information.

We're going to talk about setting up and moderating discussion boards that can foster some community and school engagement, both with your learners and with your faculty, and how you can utilize the Canvas inbox to make sure that when you're talking to your stakeholder groups, you're doing it in an efficient way, personalized to what they need, and getting the message to the group as they need it, and when they need it.

So before we go into how we use each of our tools, let's talk about our target audiences. And we're putting this out as a school-wide communication tool. But we all know, again, that we have different target audiences that need different messages. Faculty, for example, don't need the same information that students need.

Often, you're communicating with your faculty about sensitive topics, confidential topics. Maybe you're scheduling meetings or professional development. Maybe you're just informing them of some upcoming events and asking for their participation. Your faculty need a different approach.

And often, our faculty get bombarded with email, one email after another. And pretty soon, they're just not engaged. They're not paying attention to what's coming at them. And you have to send that message two or three times, go out and see them face-to-face. Hey, did you see this?

And hopefully, if we can learn to put together some Canvas messaging to meet their needs, they can see those messages as some interesting things that they want to participate with, and some engaging information that really keeps them aware of what's happening in the school, and draws them in, as teacher leaders, to have ideas and share with you, and see that you, as an administrator, are really interested in their engagement in your school.

Now Canvas for students, that's a little bit more of an interesting one, because students look at Canvas as a classroom. If we look at Canvas as a whole, it's our virtual school. And the students see it as a classroom. And in a classroom, they learn what they need to do. They do it. And they wait for feedback.

And it's very difficult to engage students, particularly adult learners, in a digital space, if all you're throwing at them is words. Because pretty soon, whether it's a language barrier, or just fatigue from working a job and coming to school and trying to manage life events, words get tiring.

So we need to find a way to engage them that doesn't just throw a bunch of words at them and expect that they've read, complied, paid attention, and moved on. So as an administrator, again, you're setting the tone for your school on how you communicate with students.

Same with families and others who might be observing what students are doing. If you have outside stakeholders that are the families of your students or people that are in your community, that are in your Canvas instance, that you want to engage in a different manner, they're not going to need the same level of communication as the faculty and the students. It's going to be different. And you all know this.

But we want to make sure that you're able to use Canvas to communicate differently with those groups and set yourself up as an administrator who's open and ready to hear what they have to say, ready to communicate with them, ready to maybe have a little fun. Some of what we're going to do in the announcement section, for example, is just having a little fun.

Back in the day, what we did was, and this is probably dating me, school newsletters. And we did a lot of paper. And the principal would have their principal corner. And they would publish a little bit of information. And that would go out to the school community. And then we came into the digital space. And we put together websites.

And then the school corner was there for the principal to put up what they wanted. And the administrators would have a little newsletter they would put up and talk about what was going on. But that's very static. And that's assuming that everyone goes to your website and has a look.

The key with Canvas, and the benefit to Canvas is, they go there. You know they go there. And you know they're logging in. And you know that you can see the metrics for when your students are engaged. And you know that you can put a message out there that they will see.

And so using that in that dynamic space, instead of just, well, once a month, I throw up a new newsletter, I think is really an engaging way to make sure that you, as a human being, are known to your groups, that they can see your personality a little in how you communicate, and that they can understand what's going on and know that you're there for them, and you're going to give them all the information they need, and they have a way to get back to you if they need to.

Now Karin's going to be moderating the chat while we go through this. I can't see it because I'm on a single screen and communicating blind. So if there are questions, Karin, please just stop me if there's something that I need to answer. Otherwise, Karin will be moderating the chat for us today.

Karin De Varennes: We are just chatting in the box about remembering I had to hide passwords in my messages to staff to see if people read it back in those paper trail days. And we're having some folks that are also remembering those days. So I think what you're doing is activating prior knowledge for all of us.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: Perfect. That's funny. We used to do the same thing, write something at the bottom. And you do that with your students. I mean, you hear the stories of the teachers who put together the list of instructions. And the last thing is, if you read these instructions, just write your name on the paper and turn it in.

And is that true? I don't know. I never did that to my students. But I imagine because, especially with adults, we scan, right? We scan to get to what we need. And we don't spend a lot of time with it. And often that, it denies us the opportunity to have all of the information that we need.

But at the same time, the experience of getting to know the person that's communicating with us kind of goes out the window. I know that there are quite a few people who have a different style, a much more engaging style when they're in person with someone. And then when they write, it's very formal.

And if you don't have the opportunity to engage with that person, if that's an administrator, and I'll just give you a little bit of our background in corrections, if that's an administrator who really has three small schools in one, and it's a mile between those locations, you're not going to see that administrator as regularly as you might. And you start to think that that formal communication is that person.

And so Canvas can give you a way to communicate with your groups that allows you to be a little different, allows you to be someone who maybe sends out a message that just is something interesting that you wanted to tell them. And maybe you send out something that is of entertainment sake or something just to grab them, let them know who you are. If you have interests, if you have inspirational quotes, I know that's kind of a worn out trope, but just something that can set you up to engage with those folks that you may not see every day.

In my school, for example, when I was at Solano, our schools are about a quarter to a third of a mile apart. Different yards in a prison can't communicate with one another. So we have teachers who will teach months without seeing their colleagues. And so being purposeful to go down there, and talk to them, and share with them before the digital tools were available, it was a lot of time.

So as a principal, to get to all of my faculty and spend meaningful time with them was very, very difficult. Canvas doesn't replace that. I'm not trying to say that this is your answer for everything, and it's going to replace any need you have to be face to face with them. It's just one more tool in your toolbox.

So why would you use it? Well, again, it's a centralized communication hub. It's a way for you to make sure that you're reaching everyone that you need to reach. You're not missing anyone. You can set up different groups, different faculty groups, different student groups. You can communicate on a user-wide basis. You can communicate with specific groups. You can communicate with specific classes.

And the way that you set those groups up really matters. Because then when you're going in to send that morning message, or you're going in to send the notification that your graduation is coming up, and you want everyone to see it, you can make sure that those specific groups get it. If you're using PLCs at your school, and you set up PLC groups, you can make sure that the PLC groups are getting the specific information or specific professional development.

There are many, many ways to organize your groups in Canvas that will allow you to centralize your communication, give consistent messages to the groups that need them, even give consistent messages in terms of dates and times of the week that you send the messages, and track the communication.

Now, I want to say a little bit about tracking communications, because when you're tracking communication in Canvas, there are a couple of ways that's done. And the most granular can be done in a course. As an administrator, you can't track if all of your users have looked at a specific message. But if you're in a course, you sure can.

If you send a message through a course, you can go in and look at what those users have seen, when they saw it, how long they spent. So if, as an administrator, and this is just one thing I'm going to throw out there, you set yourself up with a shell, a Canvas shell, that includes all of your user groups, you can track communication.

Now, do you have to do that? You don't. You can always just send, as an administrator, school-wide communications. But also, you can do it a little differently by setting up your own Canvas shell that allows you to host discussions with your faculty, allows you to send announcements in a different and more targeted way, and really sets you up to have a space where you can communicate with people at your school in a little bit of a different way.

One second. Computer screens gone off. OK. So integrating with existing systems. Now this is something that I can't show you, because the CDCR option does not allow us to do this. But Canvas is able to integrate with Teams. It's able to integrate with outside email systems. It's able to integrate with a number of student information systems that are off the shelf, Starfish, for example, which is used in college. And it can send information from one system to another.

One of the builtin fundamental things that Canvas does is anytime you send a discussion, anytime you send an announcement, anytime there's an inbox message, there is a way that Canvas notifies the user email address associated with each of the accounts that your users have.

So they do get, hey, there's an announcement that you need to see. Hey, there's a discussion board post. There's a reply to your post. They're going to get all of that information, unless they turn those notifications off. So your job as an administrator is to make sure they don't turn those notifications off, because all they're getting is bombarded with messages that either don't apply to them or really just don't engage them.

So our end goal is to make sure that, hey, I'm an English teacher. And there's a notification that my administrator just posted an announcement. I better go see what that is, because I'm going to enjoy reading it, or it's going to have important information. And it's going to be presented in a way that I need it to be presented to get to me.

And the last bit of this is multimodal options. That's probably my favorite thing with some of the ways to communicate in Canvas is it's not just text. You can include other types of interactive information. You can include different types of formatting. And you can make your personality come through in some of the communication tools that Canvas allows us to use.

So today, we're going to talk about three different ways to communicate. There are more. But in the space of time that we have today, we're going to focus on three. And we're going to focus on announcements, discussion boards, and a brief discussion of the Canvas inbox.

Each of these is going to be separated out into space for you to either go into your own Canvas and play around, or follow me while I'm in my Canvas, and working in some of the things that I'm going to show you.

If you've got your Canvas up and going, I do encourage you to go in and play with some of the things that we're talking about, particularly in the Announcements Section because we're going to talk about some ways to put some multimedia stuff in there, and how to make an announcement a little more than just what you see here on the screen, which is some words that mean very little to people once they've seen this same thing semester after semester.

One thing I'll caution you about, unless you really mean to send it, please be careful. Cancel out of your message if you do go into your own Canvas. And I'm going to do the same.

A funny story I'll share with you all is that back when we launched our first Canvas instances at seven different institutions in our system, one of the things that we had to do was start at ground zero. And so we went out, and we taught our faculty and our site administrators how to make announcements to all of their students.

Now, keep in mind, we're talking about people who've had very little access to computers that are the actual administrators and teachers, and then recipients, our students who had almost no access. And suddenly, we're bringing them into a world where they can send these announcements and tell students what's happening, that in a way that before was literally taking a piece of paper half a mile away into a housing unit that's locked down, and getting information to them.

So we went to a particular institution. We trained them how to do it. And I encouraged them to do just what I encouraged you right now to do and play around with it. Make some announcements. Play with them. But make sure that you don't send.

And at the time, our settings were not as locked down as they are now. So administrator level settings were available to a larger group. It was the middle of COVID for us, coming out of COVID. And we had a high, I guess, high visibility of our system with our security folks in headquarters in Sacramento.

And one of the people that was practicing diligently typed some, I don't want to say unsavory, but maybe some questionable things into a box and put some things in that box for that announcement that didn't apply and were concerning. And instead of canceling out, they sent it. And they had it marked to send to all users.

And within 10 minutes, I got a call from the powers that be telling me that our system had been hacked. Somebody had sent a message about Santa Claus doing something he shouldn't. And it's clearly an incarcerated individual who cracked this already. And we need to shut it down immediately.

And so I'm at my computer trying to log into Canvas, find out what's going on, who sent this thing. And my phone rings. And it's the site. And they're telling me, hey, we really didn't mean to do this. We see what we've done. What can we do to fix it?

Well, one of the things about our Canvas is you can't, you can't delete it. Once it lives, it lives forever because we have a mandate to preserve evidence. So we did our best to mitigate the damage. But that person learned that sometimes when you put very interesting things in your announcements, you grab the attention of everyone, even people that you don't necessarily want to have the attention of.

And it's a joke now, at that particular institution. Most of those students have graduated and moved on. But the ones that were around that are still incarcerated at that institution refer to that particular person as Santa Claus based on their reading of that announcement. So just be careful.

When we're playing around, don't send an announcement, unless you really, honestly mean to. All of this is just meant to be practice. We don't have a sandbox that we can lock you up in so no mistakes are made. But just know that if you send it to a group, they are going to see it. And if you do your job and it's engaging, they're going to read it.

All right. So let's talk about announcements. I'm going to go back real quick. Let me go back to that previous page. And if you look at my announcements banner that I've copied from my version of Canvas, you see that their information announcement is what I put up. And it's got a green bar on the left-hand side. That's because it's just information.

Announcements can be configured in multiple ways. And when I go to the next page, you'll see that this one is orange. Now this is an alert. So when you're looking at announcements, there are different types of announcements you can make. You can make informational, errors, warnings, questions out to your group, and things that will go on their calendars, if you're putting this out through a specific course.

Now, global announcements put out as an administrator can't go on calendars. But in specific courses, they can. You're also having the ability to put together a specific audience for your announcements, whether you do that at a global level for all users, at a course level, or at a department level. And so I'm going to go into my own Canvas here. And I'm going to go out here. I've already got it up, actually, I think I do not. OK. Let me log back into my Canvas.

Karin De Varennes: And also, if you need me to share my Canvas, I can as well. So just whatever works best.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: No worries. So I'm in my specific version of Canvas. This is CDCR. And if you go down in your course in your list on your admin to your settings--

Karin De Varennes: So we're still seeing your OTAN. Are you meaning for us to see the OTAN slides still? Or do you want us to see your Canvas?

Lynn Ruvalcaba: See my Canvas.

Karin De Varennes: I know. It's tricky. We have to unshare and reshare. And it might be--

Lynn Ruvalcaba: OK. Let me reshare then.

Karin De Varennes: There might be another trick. I don't know it, though.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: I'm used to Teams. So please forgive. Now, can you see it?

Karin De Varennes: Yes.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: Perfect. OK. So when you're in your version, if you go down to Settings, you're in your Administrator tab. And you go all the way down to your Settings, you're going to have, at the top, a way to send out announcements. And you probably already know this.

But if you click on the Announcements tab, you're going to be able to see all of the global announcements that have gone out. [coughs] Excuse me. And you see that in ours, they're mostly green and orange because we have a lot of alerts we need to give people. But they're all set up to go to specific groups of people.

So I'm going to play around right now and show when you put together a new announcement, how it looks. All right. So when you go down to the bottom here, I've set up a number of different roles, myself and the other administrators, that allow us to choose who's going to get this particular announcement that we're sending out. Am I going to send it to only my students, only my teachers? Am I going to send it to a specific role that we have put together?

And we have them grouped. So we have them grouped by OCE staff, which is our equivalent of headquarters, our post-secondary teachers. And you set up your groups however you want them to be set up. And then you select them in here to make sure that only those folks are going to get that announcement.

So one of the things that's important is setting that up at the front end. You can always go in and set up different groups of folks. But make sure when you're putting it together, that the people that you need to speak to, be thoughtful and mindful about the people that you need to speak to in different ways. Give them different groups so that you can select those groups when you're sending out global announcements.

Now, remember, I told you there are different types up here, different types of announcements, which you'll select here, errors, warnings, questions, and something that'll go to a calendar. And in this case, we're just going to say-- this is just going to be an announcement that we're going to send out information. So it's going to have that little green bar on the side.

Now when-- I'm going to stop sharing and go back to my-- OK. This is going to be a little awkward for me. Like I said, I'm not used to having to go out and in, and back.

Karin De Varennes: It's back.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: Huh? What's that?

Karin De Varennes: You're back. You're back to OTAN.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: Perfect. So just I wanted you to understand that the different types of announcements will show up differently. It's meant to be eye catching so that they see a different color. Make sure that you pay attention to the type of information that you're sending.

And if you're sending out something that's super duper important that you need to catch their attention, don't send it out informationally, because, honestly, they start to see that little green thing, and it's just one of those things that they move past, unless you are a person who has been super mindful about putting together an engaging message.

So how do you create a good announcement? Features, don't just include text. Make sure that when you're putting this together, you're putting in links. You're putting in information that wants to grab them, that you're putting it out there in a way that has something that's more than just a paragraph that I need to read, especially if I'm a student, because I read a lot of those things. And if my English skills are not fantastic, I get exhausted really easily.

So a whole paragraph of information sometimes is more than I can handle today, especially if it's 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon. I'm a teacher. I've had a really long day. And now you want me to read an essay in this announcement that you've sent. I'm supposed to find all of the information in there that's relevant to me, pick out what is, discard what isn't, and use that information to inform what you want me to do. You're going to lose them, if all you're doing is sending out long missives of text.

So make it brief. Make it to the point. But include some informational features and some fun things that make it more engaging to them. And how you do that is using the Rich Content Editor, which I'm going to show you.

Embedding some media, we forget there are ways to embed media in an announcement. Just as in pretty much anything we do in Canvas, if we're creating a page, we can embed some media. And an announcement is, in some fashion, a different page. So you can attach files, sure.

But it's really engaging if you, for example, put in a voice memo, put in a video, use a GIF, or a GIF, or however you want to call that. Make it something that they want to have a look at. Make them laugh. It's not social media. But there's no rule that says you cannot be an engaging administrator who every now and then throws something out there that just makes your group laugh, right?

So here at the bottom, there it's a coding that I'm going to use here in a minute. And I'm going to show you how to put that into an announcement that will hopefully, make you laugh today, but also change some things in your announcement so that it's not just that plain old boring announcement.

Announcement best practices, let's talk about some of the things that are important. That subject line, make sure it's to the point. And make sure it grabs them. Don't put 20 words in a subject line, if all they need to know is that this is about school closure. We're going to be closed on Friday. Don't make it something that they're going to roll past because it's irrelevant.

Give them a clear subject line, whether it's a student, whether it's faculty, or whether it's an announcement that goes out through Canvas, it's intended for the student's family. Make sure that you're putting those things in there so that if they read it the first time, they know what they're going to be reading.

But also, if they need to go back and look at it, and go through a history of many different announcements that have been sent, that they can find the one they need that relates to the information that they're trying to find.

When you're putting the content together, organize it in a way that gives them information in bites. Allow it to be small bites in order that make it clear what you're trying to have them do, what your outcome is, what they're expected to either get back to you or know for the future, or what they're being called to act on.

Make sure that your content is put together in a way. And always think about your lowest level learner or your lowest level faculty member who may not be as tech savvy. Put it together for that person. And then anyone else will be able to access the information there. Especially if your school has language learners or folks who continue to struggle with reading, don't make it text heavy. Make it as organized and to the point as possible.

Strategic timing is something that's also very, very important. If you send out a rush of announcements on things that aren't happening for a week or two, you're probably going to lose your audience. They're going to forget what you want them to know. They're going to miss deadlines. They're not going to attend PD. They're not going to make it to school events. So just make sure that when you're using Canvas announcements, you take advantage of the scheduler.

You can schedule an announcement to go out. And I'll show you how to do that when we practice. And you can put it at any date, any time you want. Just recall that sending those paper newsletters out back in the day when you'd bring those home, especially when you were probably in elementary school, and you'd bring home a paper to your mom and dad, and you'd hand it off to the family.

And they'd look at it. And they'd go, oh, open houses in a week. And then they forgot because it didn't come out timely to them. And so much happens in life that they'd forgotten by that time.

And to share a little thing with you, again, I'm old. And my own children came up before Canvas was a thing. And my oldest child brought home an announcement about his eighth grade promotion. I came from a school district where we didn't have eighth grade promotions. And my husband at the time the same.

And so we didn't see the newsletter because he put it in his backpack. And it didn't get to us. And then when it did, we were still talking about something that was a few weeks away. And we almost forgot that he had an eighth grade promotion, because it was sent to us in a way that didn't engage us and wasn't relevant time wise to what we were planning. It wasn't at a time that we expected anything to be happening. But it wasn't because we were bad parents. It was because the way it was sent to us, and the way it was communicated to us, it just wasn't in a fashion that met our needs.

And that sounds very, very self-centered. But keep in mind that you as an administrator have to meet their needs. That's our job, right? Meet them where they are. Bring them to where we need them to be. And if their lives are hectic, and you're sending out an announcement that says, in three weeks we're going to do is, you can bet 48 hours from now, that's been filed away in annals of the brain that they may not access for some time.

And then that last thing, target your audience. Make sure that your audience is the intended group. Don't send out a PD announcement to the global user group, and then find out that your students are wondering what the heck you're talking about, because they don't do PD. They've never heard of it.

Sorry, my computer keeps going dark. And they don't pay attention to your announcements because they're not for me. Don't ever get yourself into the group think of it's not for me. Try and make these things those engaging practices that are targeted to the people, and definitely for you, and definitely for the groups that you intend them to be for.

Karin De Varennes: So, Lynn, I just want to let you know we have about 25 minutes.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: OK. I'm going to time and go into some practice here. And I'm going to go out back out to my Canvas. I'm going to do some practice. I encourage you all to go into your Canvas as well. You do not have to do exactly what I'm doing. Get out of this. Come back into announcements. And I'm going to create--

Karin De Varennes: Just kidding. You have almost an hour. It's not till 10:30. Did I just panic you?

Lynn Ruvalcaba: You did. I was like, I thought this was longer.

Karin De Varennes: Yeah, it is longer.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: --also in a way that doesn't keep you all for too long and get boring. But let's go out and create a new announcement back here. Again, I'm going to put in here. And if you're working along with me, I'm going to just do an information announcement. You can do whatever works for you. But I'm going to go--

Karin De Varennes: Not seeing your Canvas yet.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: Oh goodness. See, I'm--

Karin De Varennes: No, it really is a pain, the sharing.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: All right. Now you should see it.

Karin De Varennes: We do. Hooray, it's good.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: OK. My approach to this is to always set the stage before I do the content. That way, I'm mindful about who I'm talking to and talking about before I get there. So I always give it a good title. I give it the type of announcement that I want to send out. And then I select my audience. And I go down here. And maybe I'm only going to send it to a specific staff group.

I select them. I want everybody in that group to see it. So I'm not going to do it by specific role. This is going to go out to all headquarters. What do I want to do in terms of timing? Well, this is going to be a welcome to 2025. Probably not going to be very effective, if my teachers came back on Monday, and I'm welcoming them to 2025, two weeks from Monday. So I'm going to send this tomorrow, just because it's important that they know that I'm happy they're back. I can even say, let's send it at 7:00 AM.

If you're going along with me, and you're practicing in your own Canvas, you can choose to do this in whatever order you'd like. Again, I just like to set the stage. I like to be mindful. Maybe it's because of that backwards planning that came from my English days, and that I like to know my outcomes before I actually do my content.

But I'm doing this in a way that allows me to say, OK, on Friday at 7:00 in the morning, my staff in headquarters is going to come in. And they're going to see this announcement welcoming them back to work. Do I want them to keep seeing it? Probably not. So let's just do that for one day. And let's close it off at 5:00 PM, so they don't get this in their face all the time. Just this one message.

So I'm going to go up here. I'm going to give it some-- to tell them we're going to have a staff meeting. So be prepared. But it's boring. I can send it out just like that. It's boring. It's probably not going to engage anybody. They're probably not going to be too excited about the fact that I'm asking them to come and be back here, and do all the things that they've been doing forever.

So I'm going to go ahead and maybe throw in an audio recording that I've made. So what you do to do that is here on your toolbar. You've got some things like you would have in any of your Canvas pages. And one of those is a way to upload media. You can-- recordings, videos. Videos are fun.

Now imagine your face going out talking to everybody in an announcement that they can't get away from. Just put it out there. The media is fun. You can put pretty much anything in here that you want. I have a recording that I did that I uploaded into my Files section. And if you're not sure how to get to your Files section, recall that it's out here under your account. If you click on your account and go to Files, I'm not going to do that to get us off this page. But you can upload media. And I've uploaded a recording.

So I'm just going to select that. It's going to put that into my announcement. I'm going to move this thing to center align it. I didn't put myself together here very well. But it's going to be just a little audio. Let's see if it plays.

[audio playback]

Good morning administrators. It's a great day to learn something new about Canvas.

[end playback]

It does play. So I'm good. It's going to go out to my group that I want it to go to. And if I wanted to do some audio options, for example, I have groups of folks who speak a different language.

My primary language is people at my school who need it subtitled in Spanish, for example. I can go out here. And I can actually subtitle my audio file to be in whatever language I want it to be to reach the people that I need to reach. So that is another way that you can make sure that all of your groups are accessing the information they need, in a way that they need it.

You can also put links to external files in here. You can put links to things that are not in Canvas. I can't show you that because we don't allow external links in CDCR. But just know that that is an option. You can also put images in here, so just static pictures.

But one fun thing you can also do is you can put animated files in here. So if we are not having a great day with our computer, for example-- are you still seeing my Canvas?

Karin De Varennes: Yes. Yes, it's great. I love all these examples.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: I can insert-- it's a media file that will show up and show you, when I send this message, whatever GIF I decided. And this one just happens to be, I don't think you can see it. It happens to be a little fluff ball beating up a computer. It's just something that I picked that I thought was fun.

Now, one of the ways that you can make this more interesting, right now, it's not interesting, but put borders, put colors, change the background to be something that speaks to specifically you as an administrator putting out information to your staff. And the way you do that is by using the Rich Text Editor.

So if you go down here, and you click on the HTML Editor, you're going to have-- there's that media that's going to be embedded in my message. But you can also include a change to the background color, which I'm going to grab out of my-- so I put this in the-- put this in the PowerPoint for you all to use.

Karin De Varennes: Unfortunately I don't have it to copy for you and put in chat. So people will get it at the end, Lynn?

Lynn Ruvalcaba: Yes. OK. I just don't want anyone-- yeah, it's in the PowerPoint. I apologize. Again--

Karin De Varennes: No need for apologizing. You're doing great.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: I'm not used to using-- I'm used to using Teams. So the way we do things is a little different. And I could have just copied it right into the chat for you. But this should do. Now, you should see my background is pink.

Karin De Varennes: That's so cool. I've never seen that.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: And if you go here, this code that I gave you, the reason I gave you the code is because if you click into the code, and you want to change just the color, if you start typing things in here, it gives you all the colors that it can do. It can do tons. I don't know why you'd ever want to make a salmon one, but OK. But you can type in here pretty much anything you want.

And then this dotted black is a border that I've asked. I can tell it, I want it to be a five pixel. And I can say solid black border. And then if I go back here and look at my message, now I have a solid black border and a very light colored background that make my message something that they will know is from me. I can put in whatever I want to put in here. I don't know why that's not showing up. But these are the ways that you can engage them, with an audio file--

Karin De Varennes: --to update. You have to update. You have to save it and update it before it'll show, I think.

Lynn Ruvalcaba: Oh, yes. Thank you. That's probably why. So when you save your announcement, that animated GIF or GIF, depending upon how you pronounce it, will show up.

So your announcements should be something. You can change the font. You can make it whatever you want to make it. It's not something that just has to be that standard boring, it looks like everything else that you send out. Change whatever you want to change. Make it yours.

And don't be worried about being formal all the time. We do a lot of formal communication in our work. And it's nice to have the space that you can just send something out that really reflects you as an administrator. Start letting your personality kind of come out a little bit when you use this.

And if I get-- everybody in my OCE staff gets a message from me that's maybe just, hey, it's Monday. And I just want to wish you guys a great week. And I throw that out there in an audio file, they're going to have a different perception of you as an administrator, and a different relationship with you after time, because it's not just reading your words. You're taking the time to put something together.

That doesn't replace your face-to-face, one-on-one time, but really makes them aware that you're taking the opportunity to use all of your tools to be that person that they need you to be, the school leader, the instructional leader.

We get really wrapped up in instructional leader, and only being the person that's there to do the most rigorous things that we can possibly do, and hold our teachers to high standards. And we often forget that they're folks, too. And they have stress.

And sometimes, if you're having just a day, and you just want to send something funny out, who cares if that funny thing is an image of a cat dancing, and it just happens to be something that breaks the tension? Particularly at times of the year when things are stressful, use this to do that. Use Canvas to be that.