Category: Middle School

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

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!

End of the Year Tech Equipment 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

Thanks for your cooperation!

end of year

Second Notice: End of the Year Canvas Support-Action Required

*PLEASE NOTE: In early August, ALL MISTAR created courses will un-sync and therefore courses will be deleted off of dashboards. Please make sure you follow the directions below to ensure all work (assignments, discussions, videos, etc.) will save correctly.

With Canvas being utilized for the foreseeable future, and with the end of the year approaching, we wanted to pass along some directions on how to ensure that your course(s) and work created this year can be used for next Fall. The directions below will enable you to copy your course into a “Sandbox” type course, so when you return in the Fall, all you will need to do is import your “Sandbox” course, into your MISTAR rostered course.

Watch the less than 3-minute video below or watch it on YouTube. https://youtu.be/ibyFUeqSurY

Printable PDF directions

Optional, further back up step: For Directions on saving your course to your computer/google drive click here

End of Year Reflective Portfolio Assignment

As we approach the end of the school year, it is a great practice to have students reflect on their work and learning. It also serves as an indicator for you about what lessons and activities had the most impact on students.

John Sowash on his blog, Chromebook Classroom recommends that you use Google Slides for the portfolio and have students insert audio on each slide (or they could record a screencast with Canvas Studio). He suggests three questions:

What was your favorite assignment?
What’s one thing you learned this year?
What is your favorite memory from the school year?

You might also ask a question about how COVID-19 impacted their school year.

To see examples and get more information about how students might create these, visit his blog post or reach out to a Technology Integration Specialist.

Nearly unrelated, but because some might wish to use Google Documents instead for this exercise or down the road, please know that you can or will soon be able to create and import documents that contain images above or behind text in Google Docs — a welcome feature to be sure!

See this announcement for more on this new feature: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/images-above-or-behind-text-in-google-docs.html

End of the Year Canvas Support – Action Required

Watch the less than 3-minute video below or watch it on YouTube. https://youtu.be/ibyFUeqSurY

Printable PDF directions

Optional, further back up step: For Directions on saving your course to your computer/google drive click here

New Canvas Feature: PDF Assignment Annotation

Coming Saturday, 5/15/2021, an exciting update to Canvas! Instructors can now use an annotated assignment type for students. If you have a PDF that you want students to write on, you’ll be able to upload that in assignments and there will be functionality for students to mark-up and submit directly in Canvas.

A few notes to consider:

Cannot be used for Group Assignments
The teacher needs to upload the document for annotation, the students can’t upload and annotate their own
Although annotations are supported in the Canvas Student app, this specific assignment type is not currently supported for mobile devices. If instructors want students to be able to annotate a document via the mobile app, they should also use the File Uploads submission type and provide the original file in the assignment description for students to download and annotate in the app.

Interactive, Beautiful Images with Canva and Thinglink

Canva: A fantastic tool for creating graphics. The service offers teachers free premium accounts. When you sign up you will see that they have amazing templates for Education.

ThingLink: A tool that allows you to place “hot spots” on images to result in an interactive learning experience. These can be easily embedded onto your Canvas page. Click here to view an example.

Now these tools have partnered to make it even easier for you to create interactive, beautiful images that can immerse students in a topic. See below to see how a 5th grade Math teacher has used them to guide her virtual students. Click on it to go to the interactive experience.

Or see this Primary teacher from Scotland uses thinglink to guide her young students through a lesson on writing sentences.

If you are interested in learning more about how to use these tools you can read Canva’s blog post, view the webinar, or check out this creation. As always, you can reach out to your Technology Integration Specialist to get your own, personalized tutorial.