Digital Content Management
Online Course May 30, 2017-July 31, 2017
Digital Content Management Using Canvas Summer 2017
This online course is designed to meet the Canvas user where they are at. Whether you’re just beginning or experienced in using Canvas, you can jump in anywhere that you wish to explore the many uses of the Canvas tools. The Canvas learning management system is flexible enough that teachers can use the tools to design creative and customized digital environments where their students can collaborate, communicate, share, design and think.
Credit Opportunity
Complete 7.5 hours of the sessions that are offered below and earn 0.5 Weld RE-4 district credit with paid registration ($25) or earn 7.5 CEU’s for free. You are welcome to complete over the 7.5 hours and earn extra CEU's. You can register by using the link at the bottom of this page.
Course Session Descriptions
- The Canvas Layout (0.5 hour): Learn about the Canvas Kaleidoscope and how it streamlines digital content management, Dashboard for quick display and navigation of your course collection, Commons to find and share lesson plans, and where to go for help, create a Sandbox course to play with course tools and creations.
- Account Setup and Management (1.0 hour): Profiles allows you to update your picture, preferred contact methods, add registered services for your account, and customize your notification preferences. Use course settings to limit student levels of access, cross-list courses, customize the navigation sidebar, add external apps, and control feature options.
- Intentional Course Design (1.0 hour): Learn the two basic models for course design: Content Pages and Modules.
- The Rich Content and HTML Editors (1.0 hour): Canvas has a simple, yet powerful, content editor that is available anytime for creating new content. The Rich Content Editor is used in features that support the editor (Announcements, Assignments, Discussions, Pages, Quizzes, or Syllabus). Although clean and streamlined, the Rich Content Editor is sophisticated enough to support embedding any video content, math formula, and other rich media. This session will also introduce ideas for file management.
- Creating Assignments (1.0 hour): Explore the benefits of digital assignment creation and the ease of grading assignments with the Speed-Grader tool, Google Drive integration, and student submission options.
- Grading Assignments and Creating/Using Rubrics (0.5 hour): Learn how to create and manage rubrics.
- Quizzes and Creative Ways to Design Lessons (0.5 hour): Learn to use Quizzes and Surveys and how to share the load across district, departments or grade level teams. Innovative uses of Quizzes will be explored such as for pre-reading/viewing activities. Quiz statistics tools will also be discussed.
- Group Creation and Management, Collaborations (0.5 hour): Assign students to groups to facilitate collaborative learning. With a menu of options from the teacher manually creating groups, auto assign, or students creating their own groups, learn how to manage this tool to create opportunities for choice and differentiation.
- Discussions (0.5 hour): Canvas provides an integrated system for class discussions, allowing both instructors and students to start and contribute to as many discussion topics as desired. Discussions can also be created as an assignment for grading purposes (and seamlessly integrated with the Canvas Gradebook), or simply serve as a forum for topical and current events. Learn the difference between a threaded and focused discussion and how discussions can be created within student groups.
- Announcements and the Conversations Inbox (0.5 hour): Announcements allow you to communicate with your students about course activities and post interesting course-related topics. Conversations is the messaging tool used instead of email to communicate with a course, a group, an individual student, or a group of students. You can communicate with other people in your course at any time.
- People and Settings Management (0.5 hour): Need to have more than one teacher in a course? Perhaps you have a student aide that you would like to have limited access to your Canvas courses? This can easily be done. We will also explore the Feature Options within a courses settings.
- MasteryPaths (0.5 hour): Have you been wondering how to offer students tailored instruction? Well, with Canvas MasteryPaths this is possible. This tool can be enabled in your course as a way to individualize the learning of your students. This tool guides the students down the path of your choosing depending on whether or not they demonstrate mastery of course material and outcomes. With MasteryPaths you can differentiate your instruction so that all students benefit from individualized curriculum and also give students some choice in their learning.
- External Apps (1.0 hour): Need to check student work for plagiarism? Canvas can enhance assignments, discussions, pages, and quizzes by using external apps such as Quizlet, Kahn Academy, Funbrain, College Board, Google Charts, Google Apps and more.
- Conferences (0.5 hour): Are you looking for students to have access to a Collaborative Whiteboard, or a method for Flipping your Classroom. Conferences will create that opportunity.
- Learning Mastery Outcome, Rubrics and Gradebook (0.5 hour): Standards-based grading can be tricky. The Learning Mastery Gradebook might be able to do what you are looking for, whether it is to track Colorado Academic Standards or your own manually created skills or behavior standards.
- MagicMarker (0.5 hour): Assess students on the fly with the swipe of a finger on an iPad. Learn how to use Magic marker on an iPad to assess student outcomes as you observe them applying skills during class.
- Course Import Tool (0.5 hour): It’s near the end of the year; how will you bring course content into next year’s courses? The Course Import Tool is the answer.
- ePortfolios (1.0 hour): Learn how to use electronic Portfolios also known as ePortfolios, for students to showcase their learning and share with teachers, parents, colleges, or even potential employers. Some ideas might be to use them to showcase student writing, art, media productions, musical compositions or performances, applied math and science projects, sports, the possibilities are endless.