Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Three Episode Eighteen: Closing the Semester and Microsoft Outlook

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim VanNorman, the Instructional Technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. How’s it going? So far?

Brent Warner
Pretty good. You know, we’re like, the the end is right around the corner. So. So I thought, you know, today might be a good time trying to get like the wrap up conversation a little early instead of like, “Oh, thanks, guys, but it’s – you know, I already finished my classes.” So, so I thought we’d kind of talk a little, just, you know, a few weeks early before we start wrapping up the real semester. Yeah. So with that, Tim, we’ll jump right into it. I think we’re gonna start a little bit about that part. And then later, a little, a little bit about look. Okay, so Tim, as mentioned, we have talked about this before, and it’s always kind of like, to me, I don’t know what to do. Um, but I’m always like, Oh, we do we talk about this. And it’s like, I want I partly forget, but to it’s really great to go through those reminders of like, hey, what do we need to do at the end of the semester, there’s all these like checklists of so many parts, and so many things, like, make sure we’re doing things properly. So in episode nine, the season three, Episode Nine, we talked about quite a few of these things. And so we’re not going to try and repeat all of those, we’re gonna kind of you had some ideas on like things that were a little bit more clear on or things that have been updated, or whatever else it is. So last time, we talked about, you know, Hey, you don’t need to unpublish your courses. You can show students what their what if grades are, you can talk about like removing the course from your dashboard and copying your course from one semester to the next. So we went through those and a bunch of other things at the end of last semester, but this time, we wanted to kind of cover some other things, as we mentioned. So you have a lot of these people have already been starting to ask you. So I think we should just dive in.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. So the first one has to do with incompletes. Now each college can handle that differently. But in Canvas, just understand if you extend your end date for your course, it for one student it does for everybody. So just talk to your college instructional technologist about exactly how to handle a student incomplete. I’ve gotten requests for student incompletes from last semester, even just this week. So just when that comes up, talk to somebody don’t just make an assumption, because there’s some easy things that I do. But that doesn’t mean that that’s the same at every college.

Brent Warner
Okay, what are our solutions for that?

Tim Van Norman
So part of what would happen, you email me, and I create a Canvas shell and put just you in that one student in that shell, and then you copy in only the stuff they need to complete. Got it into that shell, and they have access to it for a period of time. Okay. Okay. So it’s very simple for us. But that doesn’t mean that’s the same for everybody. But that’s the way we handle it here.

Brent Warner
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So that way, not everybody else is getting extended. And they’re like, wait a second, I thought I was done with this, right? So it’s just kind of the one student or the two students who maybe need a special situation, right? And then

Tim Van Norman
no announcements go out, none of that other stuff. It’s just, it’s nice and clean for you. Great.

Brent Warner
Okay. So we also talked, we did talk before that it was a good idea to copy the course to a new semester, but you’ve got some kind of updates and some details on that to talk about.

Tim Van Norman
Yeah. So first suggestion is when you do it, fix all the due dates on all of your assignments, quizzes, everything, fix that right away,

Brent Warner
like as you’re doing it, so not like later in this not when you’re going to start the new semester, but when you’re finishing and transferring,

Tim Van Norman
if at all possible, get that done early. And the reason is because then you know you’ve done it. And when you start your classes, also, you know what you don’t need anymore. So clean up and get rid of the stuff that you don’t need. You can by the way, always pull it back in from your prior semester if you need an assignment that you accidentally deleted. So keep it clean, digital, it’s really nice to be digitally clean as well. Even though technically it doesn’t take any extra storage. It just is nice to do that. But part of why I suggest getting those due dates, available dates, all of that stuff set up early, is because if you’re using an LTI, LTI can be publisher, it can be. Turn it in. For instance, if you’re using something like that, when you copy, the main thing you need to do is review. Go back through and make sure everything’s right. So make sure that in the description, I know a lot of people like to write in the description. This is due on April 15. Yeah, okay. But this is a November. I’m very guilty of that. Yeah. It’s not a problem, per se, but then it doesn’t look right for the students. And now you’re scrambling last minute to try to change it later.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I want to kind of reiterate on this one, this one is important. Because I think what a lot of us value about something like Canvas or whatever is like, Okay, God, I don’t have to redo this, I don’t have to build it all over again. But then we kind of get a little lazy and go, like, I don’t have to build it over again, it’s already it worked last time, it’s gonna be fine. And then like when I get in, and I’ve had this happened for myself, when I’m like walking my students through an assignment or something, and I’m like, oh, wait a second, actually, I needed to change this. And it’s often something like the date. But it could also be things like, you know, I recognized in this semester that the way I did this assignment wasn’t as well organized as it could be. And so I’m going to switch, you know, activity A and B, for example. And so when you’re setting that up, and you take the time to walk through it for yourself, then you’re going to catch that, you know, before, you know, a little pie on your face in front of the students are, you know, whatever else it is. So, yeah, definitely worth doing.

Tim Van Norman
And that happens all the time. Where – where, “oops, I forgot!” But another one is, click on every link in your class. Okay, why is that important? Even better, if you can switch into student view, and then click on every link, because what will happen is, your student view will blow up. If you’ve got to link back to an old class, yours will take you back. So that’s what you’re looking for is dead links or links to prior information. And you’d be surprised at how often buried in the, you know, in the depths of an of a discussion is, and please look at this article. And that article is no longer published. Or please look at this file from a class I go. And you wonder when students come to you, Hey, how come they can’t see it? Well, you click on it, you can see it, that’s because you have access to the old class. They don’t

Brent Warner
I’ve had that one too, where I’m like, No, there’s no problem. Nope, you’re wrong. There’s no problem. And then it’s like, okay, right. So yeah, for sure.

Tim Van Norman
And, and all of the things are easy to fix before your students see it, see them. They’re much more difficult later, when you’re dealing with LTI is, if you copy assignments, which I recommend, okay, I’m not against this, this. But when you copy assignments, sometimes the LTI will use the old assignment settings, even though you changed it Canvas to be new assignment settings. So for instance, turn it in. I don’t know, when they started this, it feels like it’s been pretty recent, like a year, year and a half ago. But when you copy from one semester to the next, it keeps the original. It’s called the I’m sorry, feedback release date, it keeps the original one. So that means that it’s trying to give you feedback back in November, and here it is April. Okay, obviously, that doesn’t work because the assignment wasn’t even available to the students until April. So what will happen is can turn it in will actually give a error based on the available date. So you actually have to go in, change, get rid of the available data on the assignment, change the feedback date to be the new due date, I recommend you mark that it can be submitted late because that fixes other things later, even if you don’t allow late work, and then go back in and put the correct available date in and all of a sudden the problem is fixed. But it’s one of those that creeps up on you. If you haven’t clicked on that assignment clicked and to see if Turn It In is working. All the sudden the first time you hear about it is when a student is trying to submit a paper and hopefully that’s not you know, at 10 o’clock the night that it’s due at midnight, or something like that, but things like that if you can take that extra step. It really can make your life easier. later and you don’t have problems that students are seeing.

Brent Warner
I’ll add another example of that one in 10, which is the Google assignments or the Google course get assignments, right? Because so we talked before, we said, hey, update your, like your Canvas modules, right and the information in there. But if that’s pulling from like a template document in your Google course, Kid assignments, then whatever that are old information. So for example, if you have the directions on the Google Doc, or if you have the name of in my case, like, Hey, we’re reading this book, and it’s the name of the book that we read last semester instead of this semester. So yeah, so you need to know what it’s going to be pulling in. And it’s not just, it is nice, because Google, the Google connection now does pull it didn’t used to it didn’t use it, you had to reset it every time. So now it does pull in automatically. But it’s often pulling in your previous, you know, language or your previous template from another semester, and it’s something you’re gonna want to check on. If you really, really want to get ahead of the game. You write everything in broad enough vagaries that it doesn’t matter. But I don’t know if that’s a good idea, either. So I think maybe kind of, actually, it might be a good idea to go vague on the pullins from like things like Google and be specific in the Canvas module. So that’s what you’re checking every time. But you’d have to be, you’d have to put some time and effort into making sure that works.

Tim Van Norman
And an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is one of those cases where if you just simply flip into student view, and try stuff or just click on links, a lot of times, especially with LTE eyes, you will get an error, or you’ll pop up in someplace and you wait, that’s not where I want it to be, that means your students are going to have a problem. So correct it for you. And it’s amazing how fast it will work, and how much better it will work for you. And that includes with links, by the way, in settings, on the right hand side, there is an option where you can check your links, there’s a Link Checker, click on that. Now, if you’ve been digitally clean, and you don’t have 400 pages that you’re not going to use, then this is going to go great. If you have 400 pages you’re not going to use then this will encourage you to clean that up. But it will give it will tell you all of the links that go to that the students won’t be able to follow. Now, that’s not completely accurate. So if it goes to a Wall Street Journal article, and Wall Street Journal still has a link there, then it might not be that article, but it will at least be a live link. But it will at least check your class for all the stuff that was going on before in prior classes.

Brent Warner
Yeah, that makes some sense. Okay. Anything else to look at here before we wrap up?

Tim Van Norman
I think I think this is a good overview. We’re trying not to inundate you guys with too much information and all that stuff all at one time. But these are things that I have seen. And even late in the semester, people. You know, faculty have problems, students have problems because somebody hasn’t gone through and done some of these things.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And if you want the deeper dive, season three, Episode Nine, we talked about a lot of the other things that are still worth considering. This is just kind of the updates to it. Exactly. All right, Tim, I got a zippy tip. This is pretty new. Have you seen the new zoom whiteboard?

Tim Van Norman
I seen a couple of articles about it. But no, it is when you say pretty new. Our second last episode was on whiteboards. Our last episode, we talked about whiteboards just for a second this is since that

Brent Warner
yeah, they were listening to you. They were listening to the higher ed tech podcast and they’re like oh, we need to get on board with the whiteboard game. So anyways, there there is a new whiteboard feature. It’s a collaborative feature built into zoom and it can also go across platforms all over the place. I don’t think you even need to be logged into a Zoom meeting to access some of them so it can be kind of after the fact lots to play with and Tim I think after our recording you and I are going to jump in and probably just experiment a little bit but it’s nice to see some new little features that are that are useful for a lot of people and so we don’t have a lot to say about it right now but I explore for the adventurous of you out I implore the adventurous out you of you out there to explore the new whiteboard feature in zoom if you are a Zoomer

Tim Van Norman
So now we’d love to talk about email specifically Outlook.

Brent Warner
Everybody’s favorite topic

Tim Van Norman
but Uh, but I know that a lot of people love Google Mail, Gmail, and hey, that’s where I live and everything I do is on here. But for a lot of a lot of colleges, a lot of businesses, a lot of people, they, they didn’t get hooked up with Google Mail to begin with Gmail. They went the Microsoft route and they went with Exchange. Well, they did.

Brent Warner
I wouldn’t even say it to begin with, I would say like, because they’ve been on it for 25 years or something longer than you know, the Gmail has existed for institutions. So yeah, for sure.

Tim Van Norman
If they did, likely, they’re not switching off. Right. I know that we’ve had lots of discussions here, how we should switch to Gmail, and I’ve tried and the comments, the comments have been, yeah, right. It’s not going to happen. Basically, that’s the nice comment. And

Brent Warner
I’ll tell you all, though, that I have tried and tried to no avail.

Tim Van Norman
And I kind of agree, I’ve been in those conversations. But outlook has got a lot of really cool features that you can use, especially if you’re on that type of environment. And by the way, this can be outlook 365. This can be office 365 has an outlook component to it. There’s all kinds of different things. But we’re talking here about your college email, not necessarily your personal one, although a lot of this stuff will work in your personal one as well. This is more of a business or corporate type of system that we’re going to go through because some of these things won’t quite work, and your personal one. So the first one is in mail. One of the beautiful things about outlook is if you type in somebody’s email address, or type in somebody’s name, that you’ve never typed in before, but they are part of your organization, you can keep on going and all of a sudden, it’ll come up with their email address. Automatic, even though they were hired yesterday. So it’s you don’t have to know everybody’s email address. And that really is nice when you’re working with larger groups and an organization like this.

Brent Warner
That is nice, actually. And the one of the nice things for us is that we’re a to school district, right. And so also, it pulls up district and it pulls up Saddleback College. So if you know, we’ve got our equivalent colleagues over at Saddleback, and I’m like, I don’t know if do they have a one or a seven behind their name, or, you know, all of those things. And so it does automatically. And that has saved me quite a few times, because I used to get so stressed out, like, which one’s your email, which one’s going on? So it’s a really great feature. Absolutely. Next up, this is one that I love is the Send Later feature. I have gotten very used to this one. So when you create a message, I am of the belief that there is like the toxic busyness thing that’s like, oh, we need to show that we’re busy and working all the time. And I’m like, No, I want to show people that I’m not available and that I will not be responding to them on their wins every time. And so. So the send leader feature is really nice, because sometimes I do check my email over the weekend, right? Like, I’ll jump on, and I’ll be like, Okay, there’s a few things for me to do, I’ll check an email. And when I respond, on the weekend, I always set it to eight or nine o’clock on Monday morning to return the email, because I don’t want to set up a precedent of, you know, students or colleagues really uncertain. You know, as much as I love you all, don’t get me wrong. But, but I don’t want to set up a precedent that like, Hey, I am working on the weekends. And you can, you can continue to you know, and it also hopefully it encourages other people to go well hold on, I can wait a little bit to like I don’t need this does not need to be a Saturday midnight response thing. And so pretty much as soon as the workday is over or the work week, mostly I use it for the weekend, Send Later set it off for Monday morning, or whatever else it is. And and it might also be useful for other reasons. So like, hey, I want to make sure that this gets sent off just before a meeting. And I’m preparing it now. But I’m not going to send it right now. I want everybody to have it at the top of their inbox before our meeting, right? So you could you could plan it out for other reasons that you might send later as well.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. Along those lines is something automatic replies. So what you can do is often people call it their vacation notice, but it can be all kinds of different things. You can set it up to be daily from 5pm until 8am or something like that. And it can be an automatic reply only to people that are in your contact list only to internal people or to everybody etc and base sickly, I use this for when I’m going to be on vacation, hey, I’m on vacation, I’ll be back on such and such a date. If you need to contact somebody, you know, here’s what you do. The nice part is you can set it up to start at a particular date and time and ended a particular date and time. So I know it used to be all the time when somebody would do this, they had to remember to go back in and shut it off. You don’t have to do that anymore.

Brent Warner
And it’s like, it had to be the last thing you do before you go on vacation, too, right? Yeah,

Tim Van Norman
exactly. So for instance, if I was going to take Friday off, I might today go in and set the whole thing up to start. On Thursday night at five o’clock, the sending out my out of office notice. And then on to Monday morning, when I come back in. It’s really nice, really handy, keeps that information. So you can just reuse it and change the dates, or something like that. But it’s a really nice feature.

Brent Warner
I’m going to add something to this Tim though, because something that someone I can’t remember gave me the advice and spend, like one of my best email advices I’ve ever gotten was when you’re going on vacation or away, or whatever else it is that message that you send out. You know, don’t say, hey, I’ll get back to you on Monday, right? Like, what I do is I say, if you if this is important, please write to me again after this date, because I that that clears me of any responsibility. And it says, hey, I’ll probably get these emails, but you’re not going to get a response on it necessarily. So like, if I’m taking a week off for a conference or, you know, even like, like winter break, for example, and I’m going to be gone for a few weeks, then, you know, like, I’m going to have 100 and something, you know, in your case, you probably have 2074 emails waiting for you. But we’re all going to have a lot and I don’t want to feel like okay, well, now I have to make up work that I that was that came to me on my my vacation, right? And so most of that email is probably like, could be dealt with later or whatever else it is. And so, but it’s another hint, by the way, almost every email is not that big emergency. But anyways, but yeah, set it up and just put it in clear messaging, like, Hey, if you know, I’m out of town, if you need to talk to someone, here’s this person, if you need me to respond, please write to me again after this date. And it has been a real, like, it just takes a big burden off of my shoulders, and really lets me better enjoy that time off.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely agree. And frankly, along those lines as well, adding on because I love this. There’s when you say I will have limited access to email, people think you’re going to have access to email. Yeah, there you go. Okay, so not even putting that in, just say I will not have access to email. Because if you happen to have access, and you happen to reply, that person feels extra special. Okay, but set the expectations you were mentioning, setting expectations earlier, set the expectations that you’re not going to be responding while you’re flying while you’re whatever at a conference, whatever it is you’re doing, right. So as well take a look at your signature. Outlook has a really easy way of creating signatures, you can include images, you can have an actual signature in there, there’s a lot of different things that you can do to make it so that the end of your email is exactly the way you want it every time. This can include even whatever you use for salutation. So I like to say thank you, and then my name. Well, doesn’t mean every time I send an email out, I want to say that but my signature includes that, because I want to thank them for sending me an email, that’s just kind of a personal thing for me. But there are times when thank you is not an appropriate response. So I’ll delete it, but it automatically comes up every time I create a new email every time I create a reply every time I whatever I’m doing. And that really makes it easier to have a consistent message. And then I know hey, my emails going out my where I’m working for is going out to every email, you know, that type of thing. So signatures are a really neat

Brent Warner
way to do that. also point out that you can do multiple versions so so it can rotate randomly. So if you said for example, some of my salutations are best regards and regards and take care or whatever, you know, so a few of those. You could set that up now I’m just gonna push against you a little bit here, Tim, my version of that I actually don’t put salutations in my in my signature, specifically because that’s my mental way of checking off that I’m done with the email for them. And so I want to say, Okay, what am I thinking through? And then? And then that’s my like, okay, yes, I’m done. And then I say, you know, whatever else it is that I say. So my salutation and my name go into there as a partly as a way to say like, Hey, I’m actually thinking about this when I’m when I’m sending out the mail. And partly as a way to say like, am I checking? Am I going through the checklist to say that I’m done, I’m certainly totally great with like you having it for your way. And that’s the nice thing about the tech is that you can change it away, and you can make it customized to your needs. I just love that. There’s different versions of ways to play with that. Right? Okay, so this one’s the one that’s like, I’ve seen you like roll your eyes on a few times and groan about it. But there is a focused mode inside of Outlook in the mail, that that kind of pulls what it considers to be the important males in one side. And then the less important males on the other side. That I think in a recent version of Outlook, it’s kind of just automatically turned on. And so some, so I think you went in and intentionally turned it off.

Tim Van Norman
For me, but for you,

Brent Warner
yeah. Why?

Tim Van Norman
So it’s the focus versus other inbox. And basically, Microsoft determines what it is that you should be looking at. And what’s just other, some people like, exactly, some people like it, I talked to somebody yesterday, and they’re like, Oh, this is the greatest invention. Okay, I’m, I’m on the other side of it. For me, I keep a very clean inbox. So I go through, and I mean, by very clean, I have less than 40 emails in my inbox total. And I keep it that way, on purpose. And so I’m constantly going through and cleaning it. I don’t want to miss something, because it happened to not be in front of me. And the same thing comes up with junk mail. It’s kind of Microsoft’s pre junk mail. So you can right click and mark something as junk, and it’ll go into your junk mail. But you should take a look in your junk mail every once in a while before you just wipe it out. And make sure there’s no student emails in it. That there’s no emails from, from your college or, you know, important stuff that happened to go in into junk mail. Same thing happens with the other inbox. So I’ve literally talk to some faculty who, all semester, I haven’t gotten any emails from students what’s going on? And I tell them, Oh, take a look at your junk mail. Oh, here’s all of those emails, okay. Now you can get rid of that you can fix it by right clicking on it again, and saying this is not junk, or changing the rule or something like that, you can fix that easily. But that focused versus other does the same thing. And so now you got three places to look for emails instead of just one was what it boils down to. So that’s why to me, I really don’t like the other. Some people do. And you can use it like a junk mail as well. So you can right click on something and say, send this to the other inbox. And all the emails that come in like that will go to the other. But it’s kind of one of those additional junk mail rather than,

Brent Warner
yeah, yeah, I get as useful as I’d like, I’m okay with it. I feel like it’s gotten for me, it’s gotten better. It’s pretty good about like putting in. So going back to like, whose email addresses loading the email addresses. Now, that focused one is pretty good about like, Hey, these are real people on campus, right? Like, we’re actually sending you an email. But I totally get what you’re saying. Because every once in a while, I’ll be like, wait a second, what and go over there. And so, you know, it trains, it’s got some learning behind it is going on. But you know, what, again, I’m one of those things where I could absolutely see something getting lost that’s important there. So something to be aware of. Now, Tim, you also wanted to talk about the calendar side about, let’s jump into that a little bit.

Tim Van Norman
So this is where it’s really useful. All the other stuff we talked about, other than being able to find email accounts easily. All the other stuff is useful in your personal or not. But this is most useful in a business corporate with college wide email system. And that is things like you can see the availability of other people based on their calendar. Now you can’t see what they’re doing. But you can see that they’re busy. And one of the nicest parts of that to me is I’ll create a meeting and because my calendar is always up to date, I’ll create a meeting and I’ll add everybody in it that needs to be in the meeting. At the very top, there’s a button, you can press that, then lets you see all the attendees, the people you’ve invited. And it will show a blank spot at the top whenever everybody is available. So now, instead of 20 emails going back and forth to try to arrange for a meeting this Friday, you can look and you can see that, oh, the only time available is at five o’clock, okay, we don’t want to do that. But you can now go to Monday and see, oh, everybody’s available at 11. And just literally click on it, and boom, now that’s set up, and you can just send the email out. So it’s a really, really nice feature, it encourages everybody to keep their calendars updated.

Brent Warner
That’s what I was just gonna say,

Tim Van Norman
Which I know is hard for some people. But if you do that, now, I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve said to people, hey, my calendar is updated, go ahead and put a meeting on my calendar, if you want to meet with me. Now, I’m not the roadblock to these five other people trying to meet.

Brent Warner
And at the very least, you can at least put your classroom in there, Tim, right? Like your class schedule. So hey, these are my classes that I’m going to be teaching, maybe your meetings and everything else. Like, it’d be great. You should absolutely. But if you get your class schedule in there, at least if you’re a part timer, or whatever else it is, then anyone trying to reach you can kind of log in quickly and see Are you available, okay, let me send you a text or not. So that’s, that’s another great way to just kind of make communication a little bit smoother between you and your colleagues.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And along those lines, making things smoother and easier. Outlook allows you to add a zoom plugin, or integrates directly with teams. And what that does is it will automatically you hit a button, you tell it to do it, at least for Outlook, or for zoom, which I love. You tell it oh, I want to make this a Zoom meeting. It creates that meeting for you. So when you send to whoever else you’re sending to, it’s automatically there with an invitation explaining what it is recurring meetings, whatever it is you’re doing. It’s all handled for you. And you didn’t have to go through and create this meeting in zoom.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah, that is really nice. Yeah, so anything else? Tim, before we wrap up?

Tim Van Norman
One thing I would say is there is a difference between the online version and the application that you install on your computer. It feels different, it looks different. understand some of the stuff that we talked about works better online, like setting up the automatic replies, do that online. And it works even if your computer is turned off. On the other hand, some of the other stuff that we were talking about works so much better on a desktop. So just understand, look at both of them whatever works best for you. But they’re both available. Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about closing out the semester and Microsoft Outlook. For more information about this show, please visit our website at thehigheredtechpodcast.com. There you’ll find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com and let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows. There’s a link over there where you can give us your topic ideas too.

Tim Van Norman
For everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC Technical Support at extension 5696 or by emailing IVCtech@ivc.edu. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everyone