Category: Blog

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

Remember To Please Submit a Service Request if/when seeking Tech support

With over 2,000 staff members and over 15,000+ devices to support, it’s important to have a system to track issues, document trends, and assign support to the appropriate technicians or tech integration specialists. If you are needing assistance with anything technology related, we ask that you use the Service Request ticketing system. There are a couple of ways to access this system.

Go to links.pccsk12.com/helpdesk

Once there, to log in, you will input your district GMAIL Email address for your “Username”.

For “Password” you will input your network password (not necessarily your Google password) – Your network password is the password you use to log onto a district desktop computer.

Then you fill out the service form with the details that best describes your situation and support needs.

Alternatively, to locate the service portal…

Browse to the PCCS Website: http://www.pccsk12.com
Hover over Staff
Click on Technology Service Request

If you might submit more than one service ticket during the year, consider bookmarking the Service Desk url by clicking the Star on the right side of the address bar (see pic below), so that it is easy to locate the page again.

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.

Special Free PD from OTIS: Alice Keeler, Bryan Miller, & Michelle Blanchet

Looking for some tech-related PD? Consider signing up for a free basic OTIS account to access their free course content . Their calendar to see what’s available when can be found here. OTIS is bringing some special guests for great back to school webinars! They’re covering everything from Google apps, to coding, to engaging educators in professional learning. Two of their many sessions are noted below. More free courses can be reviewed and signed up for here.

Back to School with Google Forms

Tuesday, 8/17, 3 PM – Alice Keeler

Google Forms is the greatest thing since sliced bread. You know the basics of creating a Google Form, but what else can you do to leverage the learning power and student engagement elements of Google Forms? Let’s go over how to reuse your Google Forms from last year. Why and how to use Branching Forms. Join Alice Keeler to start the school year off right by upping our Google Forms game!

Teaching with Google Jamboard

Tuesday,8/24, 3:00 PM ET – Alice Keeler

Join Alice Keeler for this session, which is an intro for teachers on how to use Google Jamboard app in the classroom. It will cover everything from the basics of how to navigate to lessons/activities you can use today! Alice will also cover some important pedagogical considerations to help you know when and how to use Jamboard…

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.

Some upcoming changes to students’ online access and experience

We’d like to alert you to two online services we use (Zoom and Google) who are enforcing changes to the student experience in the coming school year. In June we posted about Google’s upcoming age-based changes taking effect and have re-posted our information below with a bit more elaboration.

ZOOM meeting changes

This summer Zoom announced a policy change that will be going into effect in a few weeks that prohibits any student from having a Zoom account associated with a K-12 educational institution. This is being done in part to align their terms and conditions since people under the age of 16 aren’t otherwise permitted an account (up until now those under 16 had only been permitted under the “School Subscriber” terms within Zoom for Education accounts) and in part done to increase the security of meetings. Their new solution is called external authentication, which allows institutions to have an increased level of security without having students in their account. Students will be able to join Zoom meetings safely and securely without the use of a Zoom account and will simply authenticate for meeting access using their district Google account. Some FAQs they have shared are posted below.

Will Breakout Rooms work if my students do not have Zoom accounts?
Yes, you can still use Breakout Rooms as usual. If you would like to pre-assign students to Breakout Rooms, you will need to upload a CSV file with the details .

Will my guest speakers or teacher be able to join a meeting?
Any external guests will not be able to join the meeting unless that specific party has an authorized account in your SSO Identity Provider.

How is this different from standard Zoom/SSO Authentication?
This is authenticating users upon joining a meeting and does not create a Zoom account.

Can I pull a report of the students and have accurate attendance information?
Yes, all student’s names will be documented accurately with their associated email address.

[We had a virtual meeting with our account representative last month to discuss these upcoming changes and among other questions asked about the ability for users to add their personal pronouns. While they said that it was possible, it would have to be mapped via a field in Google since Zoom accounts were no longer going to be associated with our students. At this point, we’re not in a position to set up that mapping, but are looking into other options.]

Safer learning with Google for Education

Google is launching a new, age-based setting to control their app experience for users that goes into effect next month. See this support page for more detail. [Since we don’t have a way to group students by their age in our admin console, these settings will apply to ALL of our students, from our youngest to any students at PCEP and Starkweather that might be 18 or older during their time in district.]
- After September 1, 2021, students will see changes in their experience across Google products. For example, after September 1, students in K-12 domains can view YouTube content assigned by teachers, but they won’t be able to post videos, comment or live stream using their school Google account. More specifically, our students’ district YouTube accounts won’t have access to or be able to…
  - Create channels, playlists, stories, shorts, or upload videos
  - Watch or create live stream events
  - See or post comments
  - Participate in live chat
  - Use apps, including YouTube Go, YouTube Music, YouTube Studio, YouTube TV, and YouTube VR
- After September 1, 2021, students will see changes in their experience when signed into Chrome. For example, after September 1, to ensure a safer web browsing experience for K-12 institutions, SafeSearch and SafeSites will be on by default, and Guest Mode and Incognito Mode will be off by default.

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

Two-Factor Authentication (for staff) to access MISTAR, goes into effect August 27, 2021

Due to enhanced cybersecurity insurance requirements in response to the dramatic rise in cyber-attacks, districts must ensure that staff pass two-factor authentication to gain access to personally identifiable data (PII), including student data within MISTAR. Districts, including ours, are required to enable two-factor authentication for staff accessible applications (Q and Student Scan) by August 27, 2021.

NOTE: The Student Connection and Parent Connection applications accessed by students and parents ARE NOT required to be enabled at this time.

Upon logging in, each staff user will be required to retrieve and enter a system generated six-digit number.
The number will be emailed to their email address and will come from each user’s own email address.
If logging into the mobile app and notifications for the app are activated on the device, the number may also be received via push notification.
Staff will need to authenticate only once per day (as opposed to each login throughout the day) using the same browser and same device. Each browser or device will require authentication each day access is attempted.

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.

Some Updates Coming to Google Workspace for Education

Google regularly updates/changes their Workspace apps. To follow their launched release changes, visit HERE. To check out details on planned release changes, visit HERE. In no particular order, some recently launched or expected release changes to note include:

File / Video Security Updates

Some shared files in your Google Drive will require using a URL that contains a resource key. This security update is being applied to some files in Google Drive to make sharing links more secure. This change will impact users who haven’t previously viewed a file that you’re sharing. As an end-user, this shouldn’t change anything for you other than the link that you initially share if you use the “anyone with the link” option to share a file. This change will be implemented beginning July 26th with full enforcement on and after September 13, 2021.

Videos in your YouTube account that were uploaded prior to January 1, 2017 and were marked as “unlisted” will be changed to “private” on July 23rd. You can revert them back to “unlisted” after the 23rd. Read more about this change here. This update doesn’t affect videos uploaded after January 1, 2017.

Google Forms

Twenty new font choices are being added to Google Forms.
The settings menu is going to be revamped to “simplify” the application of settings.

Google Docs

Improved revision history – To see who added or modified a portion of your document, simply highlight the text, right click and select “see editors.” This is so much quicker and easier than digging through revision history!
Create interactive checklists in Google Docs. There’s a new checkbox option that you can add in place of bullet points in Google Docs. This is available now. See screenshot below for an example. See this support page as well. Soon we will be able to assign checklist action items to other people and these action items will show up in their Google Tasks (as a reminder, browse to https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas and login with your Google account. This is a full screen view of your Google Tasks.)

Google introduced the idea of a “smart chip” to demonstrate that Docs is more than just a page of text. Smart chips allow you to link to files, people, and events in your document. Just type the @ symbol and tag a person, file, or calendar event.
Coming soon…Pageless documents – Unless you are planning to print a document, there is no reason to limit yourself to 8.5×11. Google Docs now supports a “pageless” view that will automatically reflow text to fit the size of the screen you are using. If you do need to print, you can always switch back to the traditional view.
Emoji reactions in Docs – Starting this fall you will be able to add emoji reactions to portions of a document, a quick way to provide feedback without the need to leave a full comment.

Safer learning with Google for Education

Google is launching a new, age-based setting to control their app experience for users. See this support page for more detail.
- After September 1, 2021, students who are under 18 will see changes in their experience across Google products. For example, after September 1, students designated as under 18 in K-12 domains can view YouTube content assigned by teachers, but they won’t be able to post videos, comment or live stream using their school Google account.
- After September 1, 2021, students who are under 18 will see changes in their experience when signed into Chrome. For example, after September 1, to ensure a safer web browsing experience for K-12 institutions, SafeSearch and SafeSites will be on by default, and Guest Mode and Incognito Mode will be off by default.