Two Canvas Tips

amcdonnell Uncategorized

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.

17 STEPS

1. Click Classwork in Google Classroom

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2. Click Class Drive folder

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3. Click open the quiz

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4. With your mouse, hover More

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5. Click Send

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6. Click < > to get embed code

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7. Click Copy

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8. Open Canvas scroll down and click Quizzes

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9. Create a new or open a quiz. I have a quiz here called  Unnamed Quiz

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10. Click Edit

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11. Click Insert

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12. Click Embed

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13. Press shortcut – Ctrl + v to embed code into the box

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14. Scroll down and click Submit

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15. Scroll down and click Save. You have now embedded this quiz in Canvas. Unlike a quiz made in Canvas, you have to grade it yourself or make the Google Form autograde. It will not automatically populate the Canvas Gradebook. 

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16. Scroll undefined and click Preview

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17. Scroll undefined and that’s it. You’re done.

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Here’s an interactive tutorial

https://www.iorad.com/player/1802478/Google-Classroom–Quiz-to-Canvas

Napoleonic Tweets

amcdonnell Uncategorized , ,

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