Google Docs is ever-improving.
Watch this video to learn how to quickly convert a long URL into a clickable title. You’ll also learn about Google’s new preview pane, which allows for a far more dynamic Google doc.
Author: amcdonnell
Watermarks. New in Google Docs
Adding an image watermark to Google Docs used to be cumbersome. It involved embedding Google Drawings and several somewhat tedious steps such as them pasting the text into a text box and then finally uploading it to docs
But now, it’s all right there in Google Docs.
Not earth-shattering. I know. But sometimes little things that make work easier go a long way.
New Feature in Canvas!
Canvas just introduced a new feature! The feature, called Student Annotation Submissions, is an online submission type for assignments. This new assignment allows the teacher to upload a file to Canvas that the student can then, without leaving Canvas, mark up using the built-in annotation tools (highlight, make comments, draw marks, etc.) as their submission. This is a great tool to have students practice annotating and for teachers to gauge their progress. It many ways, it may replace the Kami annotation tool that many of us had been using. The annotating tools students have access to with this new feature are the same ones we have as teachers in SpeedGrader.
- Overview/How to Use
- Create an assignment as normal.
- For the assignment type, choose Online.
- Under online entry options, check “student annotation”.
- Choose an existing file (such as a PDF, Word document, or JPG), or upload a new one, that will be the template for the annotation assignment.
- Finish completing your assignment with the normal process.
Here’s a one minute video from Canvas explaining how it works.
Canvas Announcements From Last Year Showing Up on Copied Courses- Solution.
Friends,
I do not use the announcements feature very often and thus I did not know/ notice that announcements from last year will still populate a course your recopied from last year. The problems arises because, unlike assignments, announcements are published as soon as you create them.
I have three suggestions on how to fix this. Do only one of them.
1. In hindsight, I should have advised that when you recopied last year’s course to not import announcements. So one way to fix this announcements problems is to delete virtually everything you copied from last year’s course- except for the first few things you’ve added for this year- or indeed delete everything. Then recopy the course- but this time- instead of clicking “all content” click “select specific content”. And copy everything but the announcements. You can always pull them in one by one later.
or
2. Go into each announcement and delete.
or
3. This may work for some announcements you plan to send in the near future.
- Go to Announcements.
- Click the title of an announcement.
- Click Edit.
- Make text changes as needed.
- Change the posting date if you want to send an announcement at a future date.
- Click the Delay posting checkbox
- Choose a Post At date and time in the future.
- Save.
-Alex McDonnell
Two Canvas Tips
Today, I received two different Canvas questions and thought all may wish to know the answers.
A colleague asked how to sort annotations and comments in speedgrader. He noted that the comments he was making were appearing out of order. Here’s what was happening. When a teacher writes multiple in text comments in the margin of a student paper in speed-grader, the most recent comment bubble floats upwards. As a consequence, comments go out of order. Bummer. Right? Don’t worry about it! Just click “Submit”. Canvas will automatically arrange comments into the correct order.
Another colleague asked if it was possible to reuse quizzes made last year in Google Classroom and pull them into Canvas. The answer is a partial yes. You’ll note that when you make a Canvas quiz, there are two parts. There is the quiz info. page and then there is a separate tab within Canvas in which to make the questions. Pulling in the Google Classroom quiz, you’ll use the former but not the latter part of the Canvas Quizzes feature.
Here’s how. (I made this using IORAD chrome extension, an easy to use step by step tutorial tool that teachers may find useful). Click on the screen to take the tutorial. It’s interactive.
Here’s an interactive tutorial
Napoleonic Tweets
Twitter can be a powerful teaching tool. Recently, Jim Rosengarten used an imitation Twitter activity as a formative assessment of learning. Thank you to Jim for sharing this recent ed-tech success.- Alex
Guest post by Jim Rosengarten.
As we finished a unit on the French Revolution, my 9th grade students had read a piece about him one night, then watched a short video and responded to some questions for homework another night. I thought an entertaining way to check in on their understanding of him would be to create a twitter activity. Danielle Saint Hilaire had done a similar activity with her 10th graders, which was my inspiration, and I reached out to our IT team and Alex McDonnell passed on a great pre-made slide deck with a twitter interface on it. All I had to do was copy the interface the number of times I needed to for my particular class and we were off to the races.
Each pair of students had to write one tweet as if they were Napoleon at some point during his life. They had to build the whole slide – from a portrait of him, creating a handle for him, the date, the content, and at least one hashtag and one @ (whatever the right term is for that). They were told to do this on an even numbered slide (the first one being a sort of example). When finished, they had to pick another pairing’s Napoleon tweet and respond to it on an odd numbered slide. They were able to get both tweets done in less than one class period’s time, giving us time to look them over. They were clever and often quite funny. They also had a lot of fun, leaving the class asking if we could do that again some time.
As a teacher, I loved watching their engagement and seeing what they had retained and learned about Napoleon in this more creative and entertaining venue. -Jim