Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Three, Episode Seven: Zoom Apps and Setting up Canvas Classes for Spring.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech podcast. I am Tim Van Norman, 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 with us. So Brent, anything new?

Brent Warner
Halloween is over we we had a pretty quiet Halloween this year. Not a lot going on. But yeah, it’s it’s nice. We’re we’re now in into the safely into the second half of the semester. So I think things are moving, I hope pretty smoothly for most people at this point. Still, not necessarily all all of us are in our ideal conditions. But But yeah, I’ve been back in the classroom. I think we talked about that last time. I’m back in the classroom with my students now. A little bit to one day a week. And then, you know, it’s really nice to see students faces. It’s surprisingly like, Oh, this is this is great. So not surprisingly, I guess but but it was, it kind of reinforced some things for me. So that’s good. How about you?

Tim Van Norman
Um, yeah, Halloween was a bust for us. Nobody – we put candy out, and nobody took even a piece of candy. I was shocked!

Brent Warner
Oh, I’ll have to swing by your office!

Tim Van Norman
Well, let me know, I’ll bring you a couple of bags. And you know, so because trust me, I don’t need it. But now it’s been quiet, which is always a good thing. And so and and it has been good to see people come back on campus. Lots of people asking about lecture capture rooms, which I we covered in last couple, I have a link for you to check out. And, and a lot of people just trying to figure out what the future is gonna hold. So it’s, it’s a good, it’s a good time.

Brent Warner
Yeah. All right. So today, we’re gonna talk a little bit about zoom apps, we’ve been holding off on this one for a little bit. So I’m excited to talk about that. And then, and then we’ll jump into talking about switching over Canvas for the spring semester. So let’s jump in. Alright, so Tim, I asked you about this a while ago, and we weren’t quite ready to start talking about it. But a couple months ago, zoom, updated and released. Basically, an embedded apps inside of zoom right where you can, you can take apps that already exists. So things like and we’ll talk about some of them, but like Kahoot, Miro and a few other things. But then now you can have them directly working inside of zoom while you’re in your meeting. Right?

Tim Van Norman
Right. There’s a lot of really cool things that are there. And they released it back in August. So it is really new. And that said, as we were talking about this, everybody needs to keep in mind, it’s really new. So in three months, things will have changed again.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I think I would say as we jump into talking about this a little bit like maybe right now is the time to play, like gently play with it, but not necessarily commit yourself to what’s available there. And then hopefully, come spring semester, you can go okay, I can actually plan on some of these for my, you know, if I’m teaching online courses, or if I’m going to be using Zoom regularly. I think that might be a way to approach it. But let’s talk about some of these because I think we’ll look at some of the apps. I guess first we should clarify for anyone listening from IVC. Not everything is available, right?

Tim Van Norman
Correct. And that we’ll get into some of that in a little bit too. But we’ll be sure and specify which of these as we go through them are available. Like this first one. Kahoot. Okay, so I love I love Kahoot just in the class. Yeah. You know, everybody can play the game on their cell phones on the screen, the projector and stuff. It’s a really neat, quick game that you can set up and play in class. I’ve been asked over and over again, how do I do it through zoom? Well, now there’s an app for that. So one of the Zoom apps is Kahoot. And yes, it is turned on at IVC. So basically, it’s multiple choice game that you can set up ahead of time and run when you’re ready, just click on a button and boom, you are running this game. And you asked students you can do it as a survey. You can do it as just a multiple choice and play a game with your students to really engage them and that’s what that’s all about is student engagement. Yeah.

Brent Warner
So low stakes like activities, right? Just warm ups, follow ups, all those types of things are really great. And I like that it’s I mean, having it built in because I have played Kahoot on Zoom otherwise, and it’s like, okay, go out, follow along, come back how if you have two screens open, you’re more capable, but it’s like, it’s just work, right? It’s like, okay, processing, brain processing, trying to figure it out. And so having it embedded right in there is pretty cool, right? Because you can just click, so the way that this works and for all the apps is at the bottom bar, like the the bar of all of the tools at the bottom, on top of things like Screen Share, and participants and chat, there’s also one now they’re called apps, and it brings open that slide bar on the right, and, and then you have access to whichever ones you have installed inside of your program. So that’s pretty good. Next one, Tim, that I am interested in. And I don’t think we have access to it yet. But it’s called poly, or poorly, I guess I’m not sure poly or poly. But this one is on the fly poll stuff. So you can do I think you can do like thumbs up thumbs down multiple choice, like we talked about q&a stuff, word clouds, icebreakers, open text, ratings on things. And so that to me is like real good. Low, you know, quick engagement points for students. And so a lot of these things we’ve talked about in some of the other things that we’re also looking at. So when you’re talking about, you know, Pear Deck, and Nearpod. And like, some of these quick engagement features, I like having this right inside of inside of zoom. And so you can just say, hey, what do you guys think? Give me a thumbs up or thumbs down? Or just you know, or you could put up a word cloud and like, what what word? What does this make you think of? Right? And so the only problem with polls traditionally, and I haven’t used it so much. I haven’t used it at all, because this was such a problem for me with polls in the past was that you had to go in, I think to zoom.us and create the poll separately before you you’d like you couldn’t make polls on the fly in the past. I’m not sure if they were fixed that but I it scared me away from using it so much that I never looked at it again.

Tim Van Norman
So zoom does have that capability. And the advantage though, to poli Polly, whichever pol li so probably is Paulie actually. But the advantage there is it looks like it’s a lot easier to just do on the fly. Zoom does allow that. But zoom only allows that for the host, okay, not even an alternative host. So it’s that’s one of the things about all of these apps, it’s to fix something that Zoom Zoom might have done overly restrictive, to at least the people who have developed this. And so they’ve opened it up to allow other people to do something. So yeah, that’s a really neat one. Miro is the next one we wanted to look at add Polly and Mira, we do not have at IVC by the way, Miro is a meeting collaboration whiteboard. And it really looked interesting. I was thinking of it for a class where you are doing thought patterns and trying to work together on something. I could see it definitely for like, groups that I work with trying to put information together and then drawing lines flow, charting anything like that. It literally looks like it fits exactly what we would be looking for.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of cool things with mural. I’ve played with it only briefly but same type of thing, or I don’t totally see use for it in my regular settings in my classes, but I love the idea of like, Hey, we’re gonna build some complex concepts, try to link them together. I would think that if you were doing like computer programming or anything like that, it’d be great. So lots of cool things. And, you know, potentially, we’ll put forth the argument that maybe it could show up at IVC in the future as well. But next one is straightforward timer. So it’s just a countdown animation and timer. real straightforward. And this one is available to us available. Yeah, so I got it. I see here. I mean, how many times anyone out there listening has probably done things where they like show a YouTube timer and they share screen on that or you know, like the or they have something else like on their computer and they they look they’re just playing it separately and then they’re shouting out to their students every couple of minutes. And so I love just having one built right in and then I think it pops up in the screen somehow or becomes easily visible for everybody. So pretty cool little feature inside of the timer there. as well,

Tim Van Norman
yeah, there’s an option for share screen. But the other part that’s really cool, think about student presentations, you’re going to give them five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes to present. And then you want to cut them off at that time, you could have this shared, I don’t necessarily recommend that because that might be obnoxious for the person that’s presenting to be watching a countdown, but you could have it on your side. So it’s done. And you literally, click OK. Next, you know, and you can go through, just like you do in the classroom versus, you know, because I’ve, I’ve been in those presentations where somebody is presenting, and okay, and you got three minutes remaining. You know, yes, strict this is, this is right there on the screen for various reasons. But think about that type of thing. And timer is, it’s free. It’s really simple. But it’s really a neat, neat tool there. Yeah. So all right, what else we got? Heads up another game. This one, if you’re familiar with heads up that Ellen DeGeneres, it’s by them by her and her group. But basically, all the participants are given a word. And they give clues to one person who is trying to guess that word.

Brent Warner
That’s right. Yeah.

Tim Van Norman
And it’s really a neat way of engaging people getting people to talk, getting people to guess, and stuff like that. We don’t have it set up here. But I saw that in the system, and it’s been one notes requested. And yeah, I can see where the person who requested it actually would like to have it, it would fit very well in their class. So

Brent Warner
yeah, for sure, I mean, and we just need these breaks sometimes, too. It’s like, Hey, guys, let’s just, let’s just pause our brain, let’s play a quick little game, let’s do something different. So I like that people have built games into a lot of these apps or done gaming apps, because, you know, we’re still in hard days, right. So another one is virtual backgrounds. So if people are bored or feel limited by the virtual brat backgrounds that are provided by zoom, this might be a good option. So tons and tons of different ones. Tim, I think you’ve looked through some of these a little bit more than I have.

Tim Van Norman
Yeah, this one’s got over 2 million high res images, that it will load. I have not looked at any of the images, but it’s really neat. Basically, Zoom gives you about 10 or 12. Total, originally. But this gives you a lot more capability. And that’s what a lot of these apps do is they give you more capability. Yeah. So one thing that I want to caution us on, is make sure when you’re looking at these apps, and you’re interested in them, that you make sure that they’re actually designed by the people you expect them to be designed by. So for instance, I looked at one that was Canvas LTI. And it’s designed to integrate with Canvas, and you can authenticate into your meeting through Canvas sounds like a great thing. But it’s not built by Canvas at all, even though it’s got a Canvas logo on it and stuff like that. So might be perfectly good might not, that’s when you definitely want to look at and do one more step in research, and make sure that it is what you’re looking for. As you’re doing that.

Brent Warner
Alright, so let’s talk about that a little bit. Because hey, it might be okay, it might not be. So this is where we kind of get into the real conversation, Tim, like, we do have this and we don’t have this at our school, everyone listening your IT department might be dealing with this in their own ways. Hopefully, they are dealing their own ways as compared to not dealing with it. But there are we actually found a video that came out early, when upon the launch of this and there it was talking about like, five reasons not to use it. And I think that’s a little kind of click Beatty, but we can call these concerns maybe are things to be aware of. And we’ve added one or two of our own ideas on top of here. But, Tim, I think that this is kind of your forte is like one of the one of the reasons I’m saying no to you. Yeah, no, you want it. But here’s some things we have to consider first,

Tim Van Norman
right? And the very first one is the account owner. If this is your personal account, you’re the owner, you can do anything you want. But if it’s through a school or through a company or something like that, there may be rules and regulations that they need to follow. And so they want to take a look and make sure that those apps follow those rules and regulations. So just understand that somebody else’s got to say no or yes One of the big ones is zoom has to constantly be updated all the time. Yeah, all the time. So there is a way if you’re in a big account like we are, we can go in and we can specify the minimum level, that’s allowed. But what that means is that if a student is on a Chromebook, and their Chromebook doesn’t have space to update the Chrome app, they can’t get into your meeting. Okay? Okay, if we specify too low, you know, too high a level? Well, if we don’t specify that high level, the Kahoot that you’ve got running might not work on version 4.3. Which is a year and a half old. Okay? So we don’t, you got to pay attention to what exactly that level is, and make sure that your students are or participants are going to be at least at that level, in order to use those. So yeah, privacy, oh, no, I’m

Brent Warner
just gonna say like, my, my computer, I went back on campus, and my computer had all old software, you know, it hadn’t been touched for a year and a half. And so including that old zoom, so none of those things might have worked, and especially if I’m like, Okay, I’m gonna try this out for my class in 10 minutes. And it’s like, no. So, so something just be aware of update, keep it up all those things, and

Tim Van Norman
privacy. We’re part of a school, we have to worry about FERPA and other issues, making sure that the app actually has a privacy statement. can really make a big difference? Because many don’t, or many are using just a default. Oh, what? Yeah, we don’t track that. Okay, tell me something about it. So do make sure, by the way that the privacy matches the expectation of the app. Yeah, so compatibility. We’ve seen this a lot, as we’ve looked at several different apps of different kinds. A Chromebook can do different things than an iPad phone than an iPad than an Android phone, or a Windows computer or Mac. You know, each one has different levels, and zoom will update them. They try to update them all at the same time. But it’s not necessarily all at the same time. So do pay attention to compatibility. What are your students have, if they’re using it? And just like any other time, you’re changing technology, make sure you have learned it. So the learning curve, make sure you understand how to do it and your students, your participants also understand, Is it as simple as them clicking on something? Do they need to do something on a different device? What do they need to do? Like we were talking about Kahoot Kahoot, it’s, if you don’t have it built into zoom, they have to have two devices, or they’re they’re hiring you to do something, it becomes more cumbersome, built into zoom, they literally can just click on Zoom. And it’s great. But learning that before you engage your class is really important.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I would suggest maybe, I think we’ve talked about this before Tim like, if you if you have a colleague that you like to talk to, and say, Hey, do you want to jump on together for 20 minutes and just play around with some of these things, that’s a great way or even do like a little, you know, a zoom app party and like each of you can get a handful of you and try and try a few things out together. It’s worth doing that because having that real experience where it’s not just you inside of zoom by yourself in your own meeting, but like someone else who’s not the host, or who’s got different settings or is logged in on a different device, they can tell you what they’re seeing too, which can be really valuable.

Tim Van Norman
I often will have my desktop computer, my laptop computer, somebody else, you know, I’ll have four or five, six devices going so that I can so I can see. Okay, what is it going to look like on my cell phone? What is it going to look like on my laptop? What is it going to look like as the presenter? What if there’s co presenters, you know, all of those different things, learning that ahead of time, saves you a lot of frustration and hassle later.

Brent Warner
Yeah. So alright, so one,

Tim Van Norman
last one. I saved it for last because I think sometimes it’s the biggest, all of these apps, many of them claimed to be free for 30 days, or 15 days or all but you actually want to do it or save the document or whatever. Anyway, understand that many of these even some of them that we talked about earlier. Like Polly and Miro, they cost money. So while they may be very good apps understand that figuring out where that money is coming from who’s paying for it and stuff like that. It’s very important. A lot of them In an environment like we’re in, we can get a site license. But that’s not always true. It might cost you know, you never know how much it’s gonna cost and stuff. So understand that the very good apps need to get paid for somehow. Yeah. And and that’s not a bad thing. They deserve to get paid. But understand that everything is free,

Brent Warner
just like apps on your phone, right, so backlit. So I think the marketplace, the Zoom marketplace is gonna need to be developed a little bit more clearly. And people are gonna have to understand that a bit more in the future. But you know, you might be able to get some that are like, Hey, pay five bucks one time and you have it, you have a license to it. And then other ones, quite more likely, subscribe and pay every month, some or every year, whatever it is. So yeah, price, something to pay attention to not that you can’t just click everything and get it all for free. That is just a reality of the way that we interact with things these days. So

Tim Van Norman
absolutely careful. Absolutely.

Brent Warner
Alright, Tim, I got a quick Zippy tip, I’m, iOS has upgraded iOS 15 come out recently, there are a lot of really cool features. And even in this one feature, there are many, many very, very cool features. But I’m just going to talk about one on live text, which is on your camera, you can now tap a little button on the button or tap a little icon at the bottom. And it will scan handwritten notes and it will recognize it as text. And so you can even open that up directly on your computer as as cut and pasted text from like, hey, somebody wrote a note to me, I scanned it, and I put it right in. So if you are a person, if you’re a teacher, for example, who takes handwritten notes during class, and you want to kind of keep track of those things, this is a great little feature. And you can just tap it. And then you can have it saved as actual text for the future. I’m not sure if it would work on my chicken scratch. But you know, depending on the quality, maybe but it seems like it recognizes text pretty well. So live text and iOS. It’s one of the many new features worth checking out if you are an iPhone user.

Tim Van Norman
Excellent. So we wanted to talk about, it’s November, starting to think about spring classes for us. In fact, November 1, we had our classes populated into Canvas. And so if for those that IVC. If you have a class that’s scheduled for January, boom, it’s ready for you. That said, I thought we might want to talk about things to consider. At this time of year, as you’re looking to set up classes, you’re probably not quite ready yet, which is not a bad thing. I always try to release them just before you’re ready rather than after your past ready. But that said, one of the first things I wanted to talk about is cleaning up your dashboard. So how many times do you have classes from last spring, still on your dashboard in Canvas, and you’re trying to move stuff around, you’re, you’ve used the same image over and over again is cool as it was five times on your screen now it just doesn’t look cool anymore. So you might want to think about cleaning up your dashboard. There’s some really easy ways to do it. But it’s a really nice thing that you can do.

Brent Warner
So let’s talk for just a second. What are some of the ways because I my dashboard also gets pretty messy. Not you know, the old pictures or whatever, those are fine, but like I just want to have it clean for like, quick access to the, to the upcoming shells, right? And also, and also the ones that I use regularly. But like, what about ones that I’m like, Okay, I’m still in, I’m still logged into this old class that was, for example, like one of your courses, right? I’m I have access to your course. I don’t want to lose that. But but it’s also kind of cluttering up space, and I wouldn’t use it every day, right?

Tim Van Norman
Excellent. So one of the easiest things to do is on the left navigation, there’s a button for courses, click on courses, and then click on All courses. And then it’s called Favorites. So there’s a star there, every time that star is filled in, it will show up on your dashboard. If it’s not filled in. It’s still there. You can click on any of the courses and you’ll get right into the course. So it’s not like it disappears, but it comes off of your dashboard. So it’s not there every single day. So for instance, all of the courses that you’ve got a mine, go ahead and unstarred them unfavorite them and you don’t have to save it as soon as you unfavorite if you go back to Your dashboard, it’s gone. So that’s a really quick, easy way of taking care of a whole bunch of them at one time. If you have just one, you can click on the three dots in the upper right of the, the panel for that one. And one of the options that comes up is unfavorite. So you can click on unfavorite there. The reason I suggest the other way, first for a lot of them is because you have to click on the three dots, click on unfavorite, click on OK, click, you know, it’s like four steps instead of one. Okay. So if you’re taking care of just an individual one, it’s perfect. If you’re taking care of four or five, do it through courses, all courses, and then unfavorite. Now one thing about it, if you unfavorite, a course from a prior semester, you cannot bring it back into your favorites. Oh, it’s something that Canvas has done. So just understand that. But that’s okay, go to Courses, all courses, and it’s still sitting there, right. So

Brent Warner
another thing to recognize for cleaning up the dashboard, one one of the tools that I like quite a bit simple, but it does let you rearrange your cards for each of the ones. And so you can say move to the top move to the bottom move. I think before after something like that, a few, a few little choices in there. And then you can play around with a little bit to get them in the order that you want. So you get your top three, or your top five, or however many courses you want to have available to you right at the top.

Tim Van Norman
And it also allows you to drag and drop. Oh, you can just click on it and drag it. It’s something that they turned on about six months ago or so maybe even a year ago now. But yeah, it’s I mean, how often do you actually do that? So it’s a good reminder. Yeah, good to know, for sure. I didn’t know that. That said also, in your dashboard, all of your published classes show up at the top under published or unpublished classes show up at the bottom under unpublished, you get you have opportunity, you can publish directly from your dashboard. But just understand that as you’re moving things around, you can’t move an unpublished class up into the publish area.

Brent Warner
Great. Okay. So Tim, I will say one of the things I’m actually really happy, because this year, I’m trying to be ahead, you know, ahead of the ball and really get my, my next semester stuff prepped before I even go on winter break, because I just need that I need a real break. But, but I’m really happy that you launched the option to access the shelves now, when you did because like midterms are over, we’re maybe a little bit calmer, maybe you know, maybe a little bit more time for a few things. But let’s talk about some of the things about like, what should I be thinking about in terms of copying classes? recognizing what’s in the last semester in the current semester? What’s a good idea? What’s a bad idea? Can you share some of your thoughts on that?

Tim Van Norman
So one of the advantages that Canvas offers, Blackboard offers almost every LMS that I can think of offers the ability to copy a course, from a prior semester into your new semester. That’s great. The only thing to be aware of is watch the dates. If for instance, you have a date for February 1. Was that because you copied it? Or was it because you changed it to be February 1 for a due date. So one, one thing that I recommend is don’t have Canvas, change the dates for you leave the dates as the as your fall dates, because if you see an October 1 date on an assignment, you know that it’s not that you haven’t changed the date yet. So it’s just it’s a little hint, a little trick in your head to make sure and by the way, if it’s not, Canvas will not let you save a date outside of your course dates. Okay, so it’s not like you could edit it and actually fix it wrong. So it will work for it to your advantage to just simply leave the dates alone and move it through using another tool. We’ve got adjust all we’ve got other tools that you can do a plus editing your assignment. So that’s one. The other thing is stand that you don’t need to have 12 copies of the same assignment just because you decided to change three words. Ask for a sandbox course, put everything in a sandbox course and only pull into the current semester what you really want. I regularly have faculty who have, you know, 200 assignments, they’re never going to give some of those assignments again. They want to keep them for historical purposes, put them in a sandbox course and now that 15 that they’re going to do each semester makes it a lot easier to find the Gradebook looks better. Everything looks better. Students don’t know the difference, but this is for helping you. But with that in mind, do you Really want to copy your whole course, you should think about, just because it’s really neat. You got two months right now, a little more than two months to set up your course. Do you really want to use an old copy? Or do you want to start from scratch? I’m not suggesting you start from scratch. Okay, that’s not where I’m going here. But think about it. That’s what it’s all about is understanding what you really want to do. You can copy individual components even, and still start from scratch on other things. So pay attention to those types of things as you’re copying.

Brent Warner
I agree, I think so here, this is a very good time for me to do reflection on what was successful and what wasn’t successful. What maybe I might change the order of, you know, so like, Hey, I did this. Recently, for example, I did a little mini unit on plagiarism, which goes into a number of skills, including, you know, summarizing, and paraphrasing, and quoting and those types of things. Well, I did it a little late this time. And I’m like, Well, we already talked about quoting. And so I kind of lost like I should have, I should have brought this up earlier, because it’s a good lead in and now I’m kind of doubling back on something, we’ve already talked about it. And it might not be the most pedagogically sound set up or whatever it is. And so if you’re thinking about these things, as you’re going through, and you’re kind of doing them, maybe one at a time, or one module at a time, or whatever, that’s a little bit of a better way for you to go, oh, yeah, wait a second, this is what I was thinking about for this right and actually going in. One thing I’m also going to add here to him is go back in and read the directions that you wrote for things because, you know, it could be something simple, like, hey, the, I wrote the date here as well in the directions. And I need to change that when I change the date for the actual due date assignment. But it could also be things like, oh, you know, check the article that we read last time, and it’s like, oh, that’s not the same article anymore. Now I’m updating it because I want it to be a more you know, this year’s article instead of last year’s article, or whatever it is. So you do want to spend that time to not just think you’re gonna slap and paste it in from the same one before, but be considerate of the materials that you’re trying to share an update,

Tim Van Norman
as well as you’re in a better position right now to think about what did your students complain about? or have questions on? If you’re looking at the instructions, and students are always asking you, you know, what do I click on? What is? What do I? What directions do I follow? Now you’re thinking about it. Come January, when you’re in the middle of of dealing with all your classes and starting to teach, you’re not going to remember back three months ago? Oh, yeah, that’s right. They said that. I wish I had phrased it differently. So absolutely. I love that. Something else to think about your layout? Is it stale? Are you bored with your the layout of your class? Would you like to make it match your syllabus better. So this could be assignments, you’ve got assignments set up and organized into groups, and you might want to rename them, you you decided to do something a little different. Now’s the time to do it, you’re not under the gun, you’re not trying to rush and make it work for the grade book or anything like that. You got time to organize your class the way you want it. That said, modules. Do you want to? How are you going to teach your class this semester? Are you going to change and maybe the topic instead of weeks? Or are you did you find that with the way you were doing it was too restrictive? Or you need to be more restrictive for whatever reason, you didn’t get done with everything. So now you need to speed it up. Whatever is going on. Now is the time you’re already thinking about it in your current class. See about implementing that in your new classes.

Brent Warner
That’s right. Yeah, that’s a good idea. I also like the idea there too. Because if you’re going to do things like, hey, maybe I’m gonna lock down access to week two, until everybody has done everything in the week one activities, for example, right? But like me, it’s like I tried that before I wasn’t successful. Now’s a good time to go, Hey, I’ve got enough time to really plan it out and to go through and maybe even contact you, Tim Are you know, someone who can, can make sure that I’m setting this up properly, and I have enough time to not worry about it and just go oh, I’m opening class right now. Is it going to be okay for it? Right? So you have that that lead time for yourself?

Tim Van Norman
Trust me, I’m the I’m not the person. You want to be contacting the day of an exam saying, I’ve got an hour before I’m releasing my exam. Is it okay? And I have that and that’s okay. Because that’s just it. If I say no, then you’ve got three hours of work ahead of you before the one hour, you know, and that’s assuming that I even got the communication, you know when you sent it. So another thing to think about is the images that you’re using in your class. Are they stale? Are, can you upgrade them? Can you make them look a little nicer? Doesn’t mean you have to. But again, it’s boring to teach the same thing over and over again and not change it. It’s nice to go ahead and for your sake, even enhance things.

Brent Warner
Also, if they’re so good to him, I would say like, Hey, they might be good, but like, maybe you haven’t double checked for accessibility on those images, right? So it might be just a good time to go in and click on them and say, hey, does this have alternative text on it? That is this? Is this accessible to students? Those types of things? So it’s, you know, again, you’re giving yourself that time to just double check, as you’re, as you’re going through it, instead of going, maybe, yes, maybe no, I don’t know. You can, you can just kind of put that on the checklist. And so it doesn’t become so overwhelming sometimes.

Tim Van Norman
And to that point, if you are in Canvas, and you’re looking at a description page, and at the bottom of it, you see a little guy, and it’s got a real little red circle with a number in it. That means that there’s that many issues. Yeah, it’s brand new canvas just released it a couple releases ago. And so but it’s really cool to see that now I was looking at one today, I’m like, oh, oh, I got a problem, you know, so it’s nice, it’s a nice reminder right there, then you can deal with it, literally click on that guy and fix it,

Brent Warner
fix that it’ll

Tim Van Norman
find it for you

Brent Warner
is also alive. So as you’re changing the text, it changes numbers up to so like, I’ve been like messing around with like links or like highlighting and colors and things and like, Okay, now it’s red. And now it’s back, right? Like, as soon as I’m in the middle of changing things. So it’s a pretty cool little feature. There. It is.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. This is also a time to take a look at new tools. So maybe you still got a little bit left of your class, you want to try something out that you might want to use next semester, or you’ve tried something this semester, you really like it and you want to go ahead and implement it, this is the time to look at that, again, takes the pressure off, you can always change your mind. But it’s a really nice time to do that. For us. I love it when people and people have already started contacting me this week about cross listing their classes. So if you’re teaching two of the same class, they’re both online to have the same class. That is that’s in person. And for some reason, there at the same time at whatever is going on, it might be worth cross listing. And it’s a great way to do it, it’s a great way to work with, with your students have only one place to grade all the papers, lots more robust discussions that come come out of it, there’s reasons to do it, there’s reasons not to so don’t, this is not a, hey, you really should be doing it. It’s a think about it. If you’re interested, contact your instructional technologist and we’d be glad to help adjust that for you.

Brent Warner
We should do a whole whole thing on cross listing classes – like a whole segment on because I think there’s a lot of valuable parts that maybe people aren’t aware of in there too. So…

Tim Van Norman
There really are. And there’s some really creative things you can do with it. Even though it’s cross selected. Cool. So in the end, you really should think about figuring out what works for you. What is going to be best for you for how you’re teaching your class. So there are a couple things, though to avoid. And one of them is all the latest gadgets.

Brent Warner
Oh, come on. Tim, I love all the latest gadgets,

Tim Van Norman
I know you do. But that doesn’t mean that number one, you’re going to be successful using all of them in this new semester when you’ve never used them before. So just be careful adding too many new tools. And we’ve said that over and over again. It’s even though we all love we love the tools. It’s very important to not overwhelm your students by a new tool every time get it. Sure you know it.

Brent Warner
Yeah, make sure you know it. Make sure your students can work with it before you introduce something new to them as well. Right that’s, that’s kind of a way to think about it.

Tim Van Norman
Another thing too, that you should avoid is simply copying and forgetting. Every once in a while I’ll get somebody who copies their class. Has Canvas changed the dates. They walk away from it, and they call me the first week of classes. I didn’t realize that something, okay. Do at least take a gander through your class, make sure things landed where you want them to stuff like that. It’s really nice to just Make sure. And then, like I had said before, please don’t just keep copying semester after semester and getting a bigger and bigger and bigger class, archive it away in a sandbox, and then copy a streamlined class down, or when you copy it into the new semester, streamline it, and copy that into a sandbox and store it or something like that. But basically, narrow things down, put the scope in, that is going to be useful for you, it will make your life easier, you don’t have as much in the gradebook you’re not scrolling through and waiting for Canvas to load 200 assignments, trust me, it takes forever. worse is if it’s 200 quizzes, you want to you want to move this along. So definitely take advantage of sandbox shells and and keep a streamlined class. And it will just be easier for you later.

Brent Warner
Can I add one more tip on here, which I have found so useful this semester, we might have talked about it before. But inside of any module that you use, or any you know, page or activity, or whatever it is, you do now have the option for copy two, and so on the three dots on the right, you can click on that. And then you can click Copy too. So if you go back to an older semester, and you just want to bring over one page, one activity, whatever it is you can copy it to, and then you just type your ticket number for us, I just type in my ticket number, and it’ll automatically send it to the page. So I don’t have to like search for what I’m trying to send it to whatever. So I just type in, you know, 12345, or whatever the number is, and it goes right in and it says which what module Do you want to put it into? Do you want to put at the top at the bottom. And it’s that has been a lifesaver, just in terms of time and effort I used to put into things because I used to always do you know, like, okay, download this whole week of modules, then upload it and then go and delete the ones that I do want and don’t want and all those parts. So that little copy to feature that exists is really, you know, it’s like a tiny little workhorse feature.

Tim Van Norman
It’s amazing. You also have a send to so if you have faculty who are, hey, that was a really need exam, can I get a copy of it? Sure, send it to them. I do understand that there are certain things like LTE eyes that don’t copy, question banks, things like that. So when you do it, check and make sure that it did work, don’t assume so?

Brent Warner
Well, that’s a lot of good things to episode a little early on this one. But I think I hope it’s useful now just to kind of start putting it in people’s heads because I feel that I am going to be very happy doing a couple of weeks at a time right now. So I’m going to go like, Hey, I’m going to get my first two weeks in by the end of this week. And then maybe I’ll do two more weeks next week. And I’ll start having like, at least the first. You know, for me the way that I do things, I’ll have at least the first big chunk of things really ready to go before I even have break. And so I won’t have to worry about it so much on the first couple of days of classes were going in. So take a look. review these points and just start thinking about what’s going into your next semester’s class.

Tim Van Norman
I want to mention again, there’s training for at IVC. In the end of December, yes, you actually can get paid to be in training this time. It is the day after finals, and you guys are paid for that. So feel free to do sign up to show up whatever it is. It’s going to be done online and in person simultaneously. So yes, I’m going to be pushing myself hard on that one. That’s December 22. And then January 6, seventh and 10th. January 6 to December 22, our most basic canvas, how to do canvas, and we are going to be building classes right there inside that. That time on January 7, January 10. We’re going to be doing specific tools, one or two hour slots and just pounding through 16 Eight to 16 different tools. I haven’t decided exactly yet which because there’s a lot of really neat stuff that I want to cover. So I have at least 40 Different things I want to cover so I’ve got to narrow it down. I’m trying to get it down to eight but I don’t know if I want to make that. So but definitely at IVC sign up show up and basic 209 We’re looking forward to people being there, and it should be a good time. Cool. So that said, thank you for listening today. And this episode, we talked about zoom apps, and setting up Canvas courses for the spring. For more information about this show, please visit our website, the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you will find our podcasts and links to the information that we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
And as always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows. There’s a link over there where you can contact us and give us your topic ideas.

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 at @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. Have a good one, everybody