Newsletter Archive – P-CCSK12 Tech

Google Drive Link Tips

Sharing Google Drive files is easy, but the standard link doesn’t always work the way we want. With a simple trick, you can change a link to do exactly what you need, saving you and your audience time.

Four Handy Link Modifications

By slightly altering the end of a Google link, you can change its function:

Preview Link: Gives a clean, clutter-free view of a Doc or Slide.
Make a Copy Link: Forces the user to make their own copy of the file.
Template Link: Shows a professional preview with a “Use Template” button.
PDF Link: Instantly opens your file as a PDF in the browser.

The Best Tool for Student Assignments

A quick reminder: For student assignments, our #1 recommendation is to use the Google Assignments integration in Canvas. When you attach Google Docs or Slides to an assignment this way, Canvas automatically gives each student their own copy to work on and attaches it to the assignment so the student doesn’t accidentally duplicate their work in multiple places.

These link-altering tricks are fantastic for other situations, especially when sharing resources with colleagues and families.

The Easy Way: Linking in Hand

Instead of memorizing these tricks, use the free Linking in Hand tool. Just paste your regular Google share link, and it will instantly generate these special links for you.

Bookmark it for the next time you need to share a template with your PLC or send a read-only PDF to families!

Google

P-CCS Tech Status Google Chromebook Sign-in Issues

We are aware of an issue preventing users from signing into Chromebooks. The problem is nationwide and Google is actively investigating. Unfortunately, we do not have an ETA on when the issue will be resolved. For further details, please visit https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard. Please note that Google states that the issue was fixed earlier today, however, school districts across the nation are still experiencing outages.

Register for MiStar-Q Academy

Registration is now open for

MISTAR-Q ACADEMY: TEACHER EDITION

Sep 22 – Dec 15, 2025

Teachers are invited to participate in MISTAR-Q Academy Teacher Edition online training.

Working online at your own pace, you will complete activities designed to increase your skill and knowledge of teacher apps including Class Attendance, Grade Book, Seating Chart, reports, and more. This course is especially beneficial for teachers new to MISTAR-Q.

You may earn between 1.0 and 17.5 SCECHs depending on which topics you complete by the end of this 12-week course. At least two topics must be completed to qualify for SCECHs.

Should I register for MISTAR-Q Academy if I previously participated in Monarch?

If you completed Monarch, you completed all content in MISTAR-Q Academy. If you participated in Monarch but did not complete the course, you are welcome to register, but your progress will not transfer from the old Monarch course.

Register here – after registering, watch for emails on Sep 22 with details on how to get started. Registration fee: $0.

This course will be offered again on Jan 19-Apr 13, 2026.

mistar

Navigating Canvas Quiz Accommodations

Ensuring fair and accessible assessments often requires providing accommodations for individual student needs. Within Canvas’s New Quizzes, teachers have access to two distinct, yet complementary, tools for managing these adjustments in the Moderate tab: Course Accommodations and Current Quiz Accommodation. This post serves as a guide and reminder of how to effectively use these features. We will cover the specific function of each—from setting course-wide adjustments to handling single-quiz exceptions—and explain how they can work together.

Teachers can manage individual student needs for assessments by going to New Quizzes > Build > Moderate tab to access Course Accommodations (1) and Current Quiz Accommodation (2).

Course Accommodations: Course-Wide Adjustments

Course Accommodations are used to apply specific time modifications to a student for all quizzes in the course. This is a set-it-and-forget-it feature, ideal for students with documented extended-time needs.

Applies to: All New Quizzes in the course.
Settings include: Adding/removing a specific amount of time, or applying a time limit multiplier (e.g., $1.5 \times$ time), or reducing answer choices.
Rule: Only one course-level accommodation can be set per student.
How to access/View: Click the Student’s Name in the Moderate tab within the New Quiz Build screen and your settings will be visible under the Accommodations column.

How do I add accommodations for a student in New Quizzes for all my course assessments?

student accommodations settings for time adjustments and reduced answer choices

Current Quiz Accommodation: Single-Quiz Control

Current Quiz Accommodation is used to make adjustments for an individual student on one specific quiz. This is your tool for handling one-off issues or exceptions.

Applies to: Only the quiz you are currently moderating.
Settings include:
- Reopening a student’s most recent attempt (their previous responses are saved, and the timer resumes from where it left off).
- Managing timer settings (adding a specific amount of time to all attempts, or removing the time limit entirely).
- Granting extra attempts.
- Reducing answer choices
Rule: Moderation timer settings apply to all attempts for the quiz in which they are set.
How to access/View: Click the Edit pencil icon in the Moderate tab within the New Quiz Build screen and your settings will be visible under the Accommodations column.

How do I moderate a student’s quiz attempt in New Quizzes for a single quiz?

How Course and Current Quiz Accommodations Work Together

When a student has both a course accommodation and a current quiz accommodation applied, the settings stack:

Course Accommodations are applied first.
Current Quiz Accommodation settings are applied on top of the accommodation.
Important: Moderation timer settings can never reduce the time granted by a course accommodation.

Critical Timing Note

Keep in mind that Quiz availability dates are the final authority. Even if you grant a student extended time, the quiz will auto-submit and close if the “Until” date passes while they are still working. Always ensure the “Until” date is wide enough to cover the maximum time any student (including those with accommodations) might need.

Currently, New Quizzes does not support bulk moderation, and student names will not be visible if anonymous grading is enabled.

Edpuzzle Updates

Great news for our district! Our Edpuzzle subscription has now expanded to cover K-12! Edpuzzle offers a powerful alternative for creating engaging video content, including capabilities that can complement or even replace some functions of Canvas Studio. You can easily upload your own video files from your computer, Google Drive, or Canvas Studio directly to Edpuzzle, supporting various formats like AVI, MOV, and MP4, as long as they are under 1 GB in size. Beyond just uploading, Edpuzzle allows you to create screencasts using its Chrome extension’s screen recording function. What’s more, you can transform any video into an interactive lesson by embedding questions. This includes videos you’ve uploaded yourself, or content from YouTube – simply paste a YouTube URL into the Edpuzzle search bar to start editing.

For those already familiar with Edpuzzle, we’re excited to highlight some fantastic new features designed to enhance student engagement. You can now create gamified quizzes (like Kahoot and Blooket) by adding points and a Leaderboard, allowing students to complete them individually or in Live Mode. Additionally, Edpuzzle supports interactive Slides (like Nearpod and Peardeck), enabling you to assign engaging presentations where you can even add questions along the way. These new tools offer dynamic ways to enrich the learning experience. For more detailed information on setting up and utilizing Edpuzzle, be sure to check out the first draft of our P-CCS Guide and the NotebookLM.

Prepping Your Canvas Course for the New School Year

We’re excited to let you know that your Canvas courses will soon be visible and ready for action. Canvas is designed to simplify your teaching journey and provide you with a user-friendly platform to engage with your students, organize course materials, and foster a dynamic learning environment.

Course Template

To assist you in creating an engaging and effective online learning space, we’ve prepared comprehensive resources for the course template. These resources include step-by-step guides, video tutorials, and best practices for setting up your Canvas courses. Whether you’re a seasoned Canvas user or a first-timer, these tools will ensure that you’re making the most of Canvas’s features. Using the Canvas template ensure students and families have a more consistent experience in Canvas.

locate all courses

Locating Courses from Past Years

Looking for courses from previous years? Rest assured, they may not be on your dashboard, but they are still there. If you navigate to https://pccsk12.instructure.com/courses and scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see such courses under “Past Enrollments.” Past enrollments (such courses) are in read-only format. If you would like to make some edits and updates to your course(s) for current or future usage do the following. Click on the course under Past Enrollments, go to Settings on the Course Navigation Menu and click the “Copy this Course” button.

copy course option

Import Previous Content

You can easily copy previous Canvas courses into your 25-26 course shell. However, if you have been keeping the same content from year to year, some unused content might be slowing you down. Below, you will find steps to import Canvas content into your new course shell (once generated automatically through the MiStar integration).

Getting Started with Canvas

Just getting started with Canvas or wanting to start anew? Check out this Canvas Quick Start Guide. It has links to crosslisting directions, template homepage information, button templates, and more!

Crosslisting Guide

When you have taken time to update the homepage and import previous content, you might not want to repeat those steps for multiple sections on the same course. If that is the case, take a look at the crosslisting guide. This will allow you to only update one course and the changes will be reflected in all sections.

Publish Your Course(s)

You must publish your course in order for it to be visible for students and families. Rest assured, students cannot view course content until the term starts (check this under the course settings). Avoid unnecessary emails from students and families and set yourself a reminder to publish!

Canvas Studio Discontinued

As a reminder, Canvas Studio has been discontinued for the district. You have until November 30 to download videos and update videos linked via Studio in your course. Please note that the download option will not appear for videos that are connected to outside media resources, such as Youtube or Vimeo. Also, video quizzes will only download the video content and not quiz questions. Do NOT create new Canvas Studio content as it will not be available after November 30.

If you need assistance with any of these steps, please submit a tech ticket.

MasterLibrary Schedules (MLS) Facility Integration

As previously shared, the district has a new facilities management system called MasterLibrary Schedules (MLS), which now serves as our replacement for the Virtual Event Management System (EMS).

For those that need to reserve district spaces, please read through this post and familiarize yourself with the basic instructions for logging into, and learning how to use, this new system.

MasterLibrary is currently used within the district for building maintenance and IT requests via ML Workorders. Staff will use their same district Google login credentials when accessing MLS.

MasterLibrary Schedules (MLS) direct link (https://mi50.mlschedules.com)

Once logged in, the facility request procedures are similar to our previous system (EMS). However, to further assist you with navigating the new platform, here are a few resources that you may find helpful:

Basic User Quick Start Guide
Getting Started Guide – Training Videos, Glossary, FAQ
Make a Request (Video)
Using the Calendar
Additional Reports

To reiterate, effectively immediately, Virtual EMS has been phased out and all staff members must make facility usage requests in MLS by going directly to https://mi50.mlschedules.com (feel free to bookmark), click Log in with Google and sign in with their current district Google account creds.

Once your ML Schedules account is created, you can immediately start making facility reservation requests. Booking confirmations or other communications regarding your request(s) will automatically be sent to your district email.

Additional resources:

Add a Shortcut to Your Desktop
Submitting a Tech Request in ML Workorders
Staff Tech Request (Link)
web page of this announcement https://links.pccsk12.com/MLSchedulesinfo

All requests for building space will need to be made ONLINE directly through MLS and will no longer be processed manually by Facilities.

– For questions or issues relating to booking FACILITIES, please email Marie Rogers.

– For AUDITORIUM / THEATER usage, please email Paul Bird.

– For any technical issues with MLS, please follow the instructions above for reaching out to IT.

Please note, we will be offering several virtual drop-in sessions via Google Meet throughout the month of August for interested staff. Revisit this page as it will be updated with those dates and times.

Thank you in advance for your patience as the district rolls out this new facilities reservation platform. With hundreds of requests coming through on a daily basis, your booking requests and any questions that you may have about MLS will be addressed as quickly as possible.

Google Vids

Vids can help deepen learning opportunities, up-level instruction, and inspire the next generation of storytellers in a variety of scenarios, for example:

Educators can support diverse learning styles and help students retain information with instructional videos and deep dives on complex concepts.
Students can work on video projects and review recorded lessons.
Education leaders can easily incorporate video in their school newsletters and create internal training videos for staff. Vids is also integrated with Google Workspace for Education tools like Google Assignments, empowering educators to easily assign video projects or post video explainers right to their students.

Why you’d use it

Similar to other productivity tools like Docs, Sheets, and Slides, Vids includes an easy-to-use interface and the ability to collaborate in real-time and share videos securely from your browser. You can easily get started with a variety of templates organized by use cases to create a new video. From there, you can add motion with animations, transitions, and photo effects, and customize your video using the Vids royalty free education-friendly stock content library or your own media directly from Google Drive or Google Photos.

To start, open Google Vids and choose an option to create a new video. You can create a new video or make a copy of an existing video for editing.
You can use Vids on your computer with the two most recent versions of these browsers:
- Chrome
- Windows only: Microsoft Edge
- Other browsers may work, but you might not be able to use all of the features.
Dive into Google Vids with their free, self-paced online training course, designed specifically for educators and available now in the Google for Education Learning Center. You can also leverage this one pager to get a quick summary of what you can do with Vids.
Visit the Help Center to learn more about getting started with Google Vids.

Master Library Schedules

Beginning this week, facility use requests will now be made via a new platform called MasterLibrary Schedules. This is replacing EMS. Like Maintenance and Tech Request, this will be housed through MasterLibrary. Access will be available via the following link: https://mi50.mlschedules.com/

Staff will receive an activation email when their account is ready. Roll-out will begin with building administrators this week. Access for teachers and other staff will continue to roll out by the end of June. Please keep an eye out for an email from Master Library Schedules

From there the procedures are similar to our previous system. However, to further assist you with navigating the new platform, here are a few resources that you may find helpful prior to its launch:

Basic User Quick Start Guide
Getting Started Guide – Training Videos, Glossary, FAQ
Make a Request (Video)
Using the Calendar
Additional Reports

To reiterate, staff members should make facility usage requests by browsing to https://mi50.mlschedules.com after receiving the welcome email from MasterLibrary Schedules.

More resources: