Author: PCCS TIS

Introducing: TIS Monday Coffee Chats

In late August, the P-CCS Canvas Best Practices were published. https://tech.pccsk12.com/canvas-best-practices/

To help you carry out these practices, the Technology Integration Specialists plan to offer brief (20-25 minutes) sessions before school on Monday mornings. We will provide a rationale for the practice, a quick tutorial, and examples when appropriate. Be sure to bring your favorite morning beverage!

Start Times (feel free to attend at a time that works best for you):

High School: 7:00 am Add to Calendar
Middle School: 7:45 am Add to Calendar
Elementary: 8:15 am Add to Calendar

Topics:

September 13: Simplify Course Navigation
September 20: Create a Welcoming, Informative Home Page
September 27: Provide Clear Guidance for Absent Students
October 4: Post Assignments Online, via Canvas
October 11: Use Announcement Weekly
October 18: Use Modules to Organize and Distribute Content

Canvas

Action Required: Publish Your Canvas Course(s)

click publish on the course card on the dashboard

Please note that each teacher must manually publish the course(s) they want to be visible to students.

Publishing your course only takes one click! From the Course Card on your Dashboard, click “Publish” (see screenshot below).

Alternatively, you can open the course home page and click the “Publish” button on the right side of the screen (see screenshot below).

As a reminder, your courses in MISTAR have been auto-populated in Canvas and auto-rostered with students. These are the course(s) you should publish and actively use with students. Any manually created courses should either be copied or cross-listed with your auto-populated courses. You can also cross-list multiple sections of the same course following the instructions provided in one of our previous posts.

Canvas

Canvas Support Office Hours

We hope you had a relaxing and rejuvenating summer break. As you work on getting your Canvas course(s) up and running, we want to offer you support. On Wednesday afternoon (September 1) we will offer office hours via Zoom from 12:30-3:30 pm. Add to your calendar.

If you are looking for other forms of support, the Help option on the Course Navigation Menu has several great options. See the image below.

You can also schedule a one-on-one coaching session with a Canvas representative, also known as a Panda Pro. https://tech.pccsk12.com/panda-pros-coaching/

Canvas

P-CCS Canvas Best Practices

As we enter our second year with Canvas as our district’s learning management system, it’s important to continue to have it serve as the digital centerpiece for our classrooms. In an effort to foster a more uniform experience for our students and families, staff are encouraged to construct and maintain their Canvas courses bearing in mind these P-CCS Canvas Best Practices.

If you have questions or would like assistance implementing any of these practices, please consider attending a “WorkLab” session on Thursday, August 26 during Canvas Camp or one of the Canvas Q & A sessions on either Thursday, August 26th or Monday, August 30th.

Finally, know your friendly, district Technology Integration Specialists will also plan sessions for each of these items during the first six weeks of school (and sessions will be recorded and posted) as embracing these best practices will help our students.

Canvas

Canvas Camp 2021

Pack your bags for Canvas Camp! Join your Technology Integration Specialists for Canvas sessions heading into the new school year. We will be offering a variety of sessions:

Worklabs: Set aside some time to work on your Canvas course with Matt and Kaelyn available to assist. Set a goal for your worktime and join breakout rooms with others working on the same thing: home page set up, organizing modules, or getting back to the basics of setting up your course. Elementary and Secondary sessions offered. Join virtually or come to the Tanger Media Center.
Studio and Canvas Q & A sessions with Canvas trainers (limit of 30 virtual participants)
Course Design Considerations with a Canvas trainer (limit of 50 virtual participants). Topics include course home page design, organizing modules, and setting up assignments in a more user-friendly way.
Tech Integrationist Face-Off: Canvas Tips: Watch Matt and Kaelyn showdown about their favorite tips and features of Canvas.

SCECHs are available for attendance. Interact with the image below (click the + button) for more details and to add the sessions to your Google Calendar click here.

Canva for Education…Now District-Wide!

I’m pleased to share that we’ve recently launched Canva for Education district-wide! Canva makes it easy to create, collaborate, and communicate visually – in the classroom and beyond. If you’ve never heard of Canva for Education, you can learn more about the tool here.

With Canva for Education, you can create classroom decor kits, Canvas buttons & banners, education presentations, lesson plans, worksheets, reports, posters, and more. You can empower your students through authentic assessments and tasks, enabling them to create beautiful, real-world deliverables quickly and easily. You can use Canva for student assignments and enable real-time collaboration on Canva projects. Students can turn-in these projects and you can embed your designs easily with the Canvas integration.

Everyone with a district email address will receive all the benefits of Canva for Education, including all of Canva’s “pro” features, at no cost and with no validation or application required. You can log in to our new Canva district team with your district credentials at www.canva.com and you can also find it in the waffle.

Please take some time to review this teacher onboarding guide from the team at Canva. We encourage everyone to review these materials, as there are some aspects of the district Canva platform that will differ from what you may be used to if you’ve already used Canva. If you already have a Canva account under your district email address it’s especially important to pay attention to the pages that have to do with logging in, switching teams, and copying files. You can view just those pages here.

If you have any questions about Canva, or would like to learn more about using Canva in the classroom, you can contact a Tech Integration Specialist by submitting a ticket. There are also lots of great resources available at designschool.canva.com.

See additional resources below.

Time to Consider Cross-listing

As we approach the new school year, those of you who are teaching multiple sections of the same course might consider cross-listing in Canvas. Cross-listing allows you to move section enrollments from individual courses and combine them into one course. This feature is helpful for instructors who teach several sections of the same course and only want to manage course data in one location. So if you are a teacher that has multiple sections of one course or an elementary specialist that has many different sections, cross listing may be a great option for you and a big time saver. However, this action should only be done before a semester starts. Canvas recommends it be done before a course is published. If it is done after a course is published and notably student work has been submitted, that student work will be lost. Review the slideshow below carefully to help you decide if you want to do it. [Please note, teachers should expect to have access to their new, MISTAR-linked Canvas courses a few days before students start school and anytime after they gain access they will be able to cross list them if they choose.]

Please reach out to a Technology Integration Specialist if you need help deciding if this is right for you or if you want assistance setting it up.

cross-list

Access to Google Drive Cloud Assignment service to be “hidden”, effective August 1st

In two of last October’s P-CCS Technology Newsletters (10/07/2020 and 10/21/2020), the technology department had blog posts about the Google Drive Cloud Assignment service (Google Drive Cloud Assignment Going Away in Canvas and Google Assignment Clarification Post). As we shared in those blog posts, the GDCA service is an older service of Canvas’s Google Integration and its technical support and development were effectively being curtailed by Canvas. Canvas’ advice to our district at the time has not changed, if anything, it has grown more insistent — wean users from any reliance on the GDCA service, and for those looking for Google integration continue to direct them to only use our newer, supported service, Google Assignment (associated with Google’s updated assignment creation/management tool).

On August 1, 2021, as we noted last October, we will be hiding access to the service; by hiding access to the service instead of removing it altogether, while teachers will no longer be able to create new Google Drive Cloud assignments, they will still be able to open previously created Drive Cloud assignments in Canvas, both to review them and, when interested, to convert them into Google Assignments.

For information and help on how to convert a GDCA to a Google Assignment, check out the video below:

For more information on Google Assignments, please click here.

Locating Your 2020-21 School Year Canvas Courses

Image of selecting course content to copy

When you next login to Canvas, you may be looking for your courses from last year (the recently ended 2020-21 school year). To find them click on the Courses button on the Global Navigation menu and then “All Courses” to arrive at http://pccsk12.instructure.com/courses. At the bottom of that page you will find “Past Enrollments.”

The courses in “Past Enrollments” are view only, including the copies you made per our directions in another blog post. In order to edit your course and start making updates for the 21-22 school year, you need create a new course and copy last year’s content into it.

August 27, 2021 Update: You do not have to create a sandbox course. You can start at step 2 and import your old course directly into your 21-22, MiStar-created course.

Give your course a name and then import existing content into the course.

To watch these steps in video format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvR3xt3RIVw

Please reach out to a Technology Integration Specialist if you need assistance.

Second Notice: End of the Year Tech Checklist

As you make plans to close up your classroom for the summer (and a well deserved break), please take care of the following items:

Copy your Canvas courses so you don’t lose any content! https://tech.pccsk12.com/second-notice-end-of-the-year-canvas-support-action-required/
Please comply with the directions of your principal and main office to turn in or secure all classroom technology equipment such as document cameras, microphones, interactive pens, and remotes.
Please also secure or take home all District-assigned devices (laptop, Chromebook, iPad, etc.), as well as all personally-owned devices..
- If you are leaving the District, complete this form.
Power off projectors/IFPs, sound amps, and desktop computers.
- You may leave printer and copiers plugged in and powered on
Follow the care suggestions for classroom audio

Virtual Academy Teachers: Please return monitors and other borrowed equipment, such as document cameras to the Board Office. You may drop off during these hours:

Through June 11: 1:30-3:00 pm each day
Week of June 14: Monday through Thursday, 9:00-11:00 am and 1:00-3:00 pm
No drop off availability June 18-July 5

Thanks for your cooperation!