Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast, Season Four Episode 11 Canvas Hidden Gems and 2023 Conferences

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech podcast. I am Tim Van Norman, 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. Welcome.

Tim Van Norman
We’re glad you’re here with us. This new change in year happiness the first episode of 2023. Yes. Happy New Year and made slight change in my family. Oh, yeah. We now a grandchild. So our first grandchild was born on the 28th Congratulation, my wife was Thank you. My wife was on her way there still. She left on Christmas Day and flew the airlines had life problems. Yeah, and wound up switching airlines in the middle of all of that to get there. So she got her luggage as of Tuesday at about noon our time I think.

Brent Warner
Okay, well, I’m glad you got it back at least.

Tim Van Norman
This week, Tuesday, you know… So a week later, but you got it. Yeah.

Brent Warner
That is it’s been a terrible, terrible flying season, but glad you got it. So, Tim, are you getting any? Like, grandpa style nicknames? Are you going to be like pappy or…?

Tim Van Norman
my wife wants us to do that. And I figured that the kid’ll name me. Okay, but you know, we’ll see if this is the first one. Can’t talk yet, anyways. So we still have a little bit of time. That’s fair. Yeah. And I wouldn’t just be Grandpa Tim. You know.

Brent Warner
Yeah. That would work too. Good. Well, I think you can hear a little bit of it in my voice I got hit over the winter break with the one of the one of the respiratory infections that was going around. I’m feel pretty good about my throat and there’s still a little bit of phlegm and stuff going on in there. So so we’ll just call me husky voice for today. And, and think of it as being appealing somehow.

Tim Van Norman
Yeah, it is a little bit deeper than normal. So

Brent Warner
yeah, so I might, I might have to pause this every once in a while to to clear the clear the airways. But anyways, here we are. 2023. Good to see you again. And glad we’re back. We are kind of going into our flex week, our professional development week at Irvine Valley College. This, of course comes out on the first Thursday, and we come back on the we come back for our flex week on the first on the second week, second week, and then classes start on the third week, right? Yep. Okay. So like, where are we in the world? So we wanted to talk about a few of these things. And we’ll start off with the the first area we’re at with the Canvas stuff, we haven’t talked about Canvas very much. So let’s jump over there and share a bit about Canvas hidden gems. So Tim, we want to talk about I feel like when we first started the show, we were talking about Canvas stuff all the time, like updates, updates, updates, updates, they were what are these things going on? And then recently, it’s been like, oh, there hasn’t been at least there haven’t been major changes, like there used to be all the time. And so you were kind of explaining that partly and then. But there are still things happening, we just haven’t spent quite as much time talking about it. So we thought we’d collect some of the older things that have that we maybe haven’t talked about so much. And some of the newer things that have come out a little bit more recently, but we haven’t we haven’t brought in specifically so so I want you to kind of take over here a little bit and let me rest my aching throat.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. So some of these, like this first one apparently came out in March of 2020. And for some reason I asked that I think otherwise occupied at the time.

Brent Warner
March 25, march

Tim Van Norman
2020. Yeah, I always said that. That’s what I was shocked but I actually I’m shocked I hadn’t seen it. But in your syllabus in Canvas. Once you put something into the syllabus into the top part, there’s a button that comes up that allows you to show or not show the Here’s the schedule that’s at the bottom of the syllabus.

Brent Warner
Now really nice actually, at first, I

Tim Van Norman
was like, Well, why would you want this? Like, why would you not want it to have that option. So this is a really deep thing, think about it as if at the beginning of your class, you publish every single assignment that you’re going to have, then having it show up in the syllabus is a great because the students can see ahead of time, every single assignment, they can’t go into it, they can’t do anything about it submitted or anything else, but they can see everything that’s there. Now, let’s flip it to the other side, where you’re working two weeks ahead of your class. Or you’re making lots of changes, you don’t necessarily want to publish every single assignment, you don’t want to give the students the impression that everything is there in the syllabus. So if you simply check that box, it will show everything if it’s unchecked, I believe it is it will actually hide all of this schedule for your class from the syllabus.

Brent Warner
Yeah, the second person is the one that you described is definitely my style, where it’s like, oh, I’m going to make big changes. I, you know, my students talked about this, okay, we’re going to be bringing in a new thing, I’m going to be swapping out an old thing. You know, we got to change things around. So that’s, that’s definitely my style in approaching and building everything. I really respect people who have a very well perfectly planned out and know exactly what’s going to happen every single time and every single class, but that is not my class. And so I always very much disliked that, that feature in there. Because it’s like, come on, like it is, you know, even though it’s it’s a legitimate style, if it always made me feel kind of bad, like, Oh, I’m not I’m not as prepared as I need to be, you know, whatever else it is. So I like that you can turn that off. That’s great.

Tim Van Norman
Yes. So it’s a great feature. But new to me, I had literally just a month ago is the first time I realized that. So something that truly is new, though, is Canvas is now put in in pages at the bottom of the where you can create a page, it looks a lot like announcements that you can now choose when that page is published and available for your students. So why would that matter? A lot of people can’t come up with a good reason. But the one I can think of is you want your Instagress through your class on a certain timing. You don’t want them to get ahead. So you can actually assignments with quizzes, announcements, everything else, you put a date when that’s available to the student. Now you can do that with a page as well. Yeah. So you can have all of your modules published, or two or three weeks from now published, but they can’t see into the page until you’re ready for them to based on timing.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I like that. That’s it seems weird to me that that didn’t exist before. It seems like an obvious kind of it already exists for assignments, why not have it for pages to but by it’s nice that that’s there.

Tim Van Norman
And that was just added in December? Yeah,

Brent Warner
great. So I want to share one Tim that I found, which is kind of fun. But if you’re in a if you find a 404 page, or if you just tell your students to go to a 404 page and what I mean by a 404 pages, when you go to a page that doesn’t exist. So on any Canvas page, if you just type the letter X at the end of whatever the URL is and hit enter, it’ll take you to a 404 page and it says, Hey, this page can’t be found. But I did not know this, if you hit the spacebar on that page, it will activate a little game. So some people have seen this in Chrome if you’re offline. And you know you’re not connected to the internet. And it’ll open up a little game where you can do the dinosaur runner that has a couple of different games inside of Canvas that you can actually play if you hit a missing page that doesn’t exist. So you know, it can just be silly, of course, but you can also use this as a brain break for your students and just say like, Hey, guys, let’s just take two minutes. Let’s play a game. Let’s see who can get the highest score. And they have these kind of old fashioned arcade style games like almost like a snake style game or you’re trying to work your way through a little you know, not get hit by these. I don’t know, bullets or something and then and then another one where you’re a spaceship shooting. It looks like Coronavirus I guess that’s right. So, so there’s a few a few different cool things inside of there. And so anyways, simple but if you just If your class is just restless for whatever reason, you can you can throw everybody on there and just say let’s just play a quick game. Let’s see who gets the highest score and then you can kind of refresh and start over again.

Tim Van Norman
All right, so the next one we wanted to talk about is undelete. So one of the really cool features that You got in Canvas is you can go to homepage, basically, it doesn’t really matter, any page in Canvas, and at the top, type in slash undelete at the end of that page. Now, this is when you’re in your class, when you do that, you will get a list of everything that has been loaded into that Canvas shell that has been deleted. So as you’re going through and looking, it’s not going to be in order, you have to be very careful, it won’t tell you when you deleted it. But it will tell you when you last made a change to it. So be very careful as you go through. It can be very dangerous, but it could be a lifesaver. If you accidentally accidentally deleted something and my module, all the links that were in the module, I thought they’d be someplace something and they’re gone. And you can undelete a module, for instance, and everything comes back.

Brent Warner
That’s real nice. Very nice. I’ve

Tim Van Norman
saved a lot of people a lot of time by doing that. So

Brent Warner
that’s a quick way to make yourself a hero to your department as well if someone comes up with something, so I like that.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. Another thing that this isn’t a hidden gem necessarily, but it’s something that you might have noticed. If not, you’re going to notice it now. And that is that as of December 9 Unsplash. Images are not integrated into Canvas anymore. So any images you’ve used perfectly fine, you can go to unsplash.com and download an image and use it in Canvas. But you it’s not built in any more into Canvas where you can just Oh, add an image, click on Unsplash type in something and pull that image in.

Brent Warner
It’s too bad. It is. But that’s probably probably some sort of business thing that happened there. So likely. Okay, cool. So those are a couple things just good to be aware of. We got a couple more before we wrap up. So what else do you have for us, Tim?

Tim Van Norman
So student grades feedback. So in grades for students, when they click on grades, it now and this is really really recent, it has a little blue button next to things that they haven’t looked at. So if they haven’t looked at, for instance, your your feedback that you’ve given them comments, at least the latest comment, it’s got a little tiny blue dot next to it, okay, so they can see that’s what you haven’t looked at yet. And they can look at it. And once they’ve seen it, the dot goes away. But same thing happens with regard to rubrics, a couple of other things. It’s just basically kind of an indicator that hey, you haven’t looked at this yet. One more place? Sorry.

Brent Warner
Does that mean the teacher can see that too? Or the or only the student themselves?

Tim Van Norman
The students themselves? This is not for? Unfortunately, the teachers can’t see this. From what I could see,

Brent Warner
it would be really nice. It’d be like, Hey, you didn’t? You clearly did not look? Right. Yeah. Okay. So Canvas get on that next step to it

Tim Van Norman
doesn’t say they actually read it, it just they look at it. So yes. So the last one I wanted to bring up here is, even though I still do not suggest you use new, new quizzes, or reasons to use new quizzes, and so I’m not fighting anybody, I just don’t like it because of some of the bugs that are still there. But canvas just released very recently, where new quizzes now uses the new rich content editor that has been in Canvas for the past years. But up until now, it was using the old content editor. So it’s, it makes a lot of sense for Canvas to have moved along in this direction. And it will change things a little bit just from the view standpoint. But it is a really good direction. And frankly, they’re making additional changes to that rich content editor and improving it. So it makes sense to include it in that product.

Brent Warner
Yeah, that’s good. So that mean, again, yeah, probably not new cruisers so much. But the thing is like Canvas has really had this need to make their make everything uniform. And it feels like they’re trying to line up like, hey, all the different resources or all the different things that we use, they’re going to be the same and uniform, hopefully across different different use cases. So sounds like kind of the same thing with being able to publish pages, the same thing with you know, a few of these different things where it’s like, hey, it’s not different when you log into it when you’re making a different type of assignment or different type of content on Canvas. So glad to hear that. They’re kind of typing a lot of those things up.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. It’s doing they’re doing a nice job of that too. Good.

Brent Warner
Good. Okay. So if anybody is interested, there are always release notes on canvas. And so you can go to just Canvas release notes, search it on Google and you’ll be able to find it. It’s good to keep up with those things and take a look at it every once in a while, maybe once a month, just log in, and you should be able to find something that can help you kind of figure out your way through what’s going on what’s up next. And then, you know, if we’re not updating you quickly enough, you can find something out there as well.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely.

Brent Warner
All right, so Tim, today’s Zippy tip is a little bit of a kind of a fun and silly one that’s coming up with more stuff, but canva.com. So canva.com is one of those images, you know, like, you can create all sorts of different things, you can create pictures for your class, you can create cards with quotes on them, you can create slide decks, you can create little videos, you can do amazing stuff in it, but but the Zippy tip is that they have a new little tool, an app inside of it called Text to image. And it this is not word art. So I want to be careful about this. What this is, is you actually type in, you know, a image, you type in a prompt, and then it will use artificial intelligence to generate an AI image of whatever you’re talking about. So I will say it’s not perfect, but it is fun to play with, and to kind of just see what comes up. So I was showing you pre show to him, you know, you could say, fire coming out of a computer. And it kind of made that picture, right, like I gave you four different options of things that kind of look like that, or that I did challenge it with some pretty hard ones, and it didn’t quite get it. So I said, you know, dog holding nunchucks riding a skateboard across a rainbow. And it did not quite get that one as I thought but but you know, you’re it’s fun to play with inside of there. And if you need an image that you’re not quite finding online that’s kind of customized or unique, and you want to put it into your core shell or into your syllabus or an activity or an assignment that might be a way to do it is to have it just, you know, generated by artificial intelligence. So canva.com, and then you can use the little text to Image App.

Tim Van Norman
Nice. So we wanted to start off the year, talking about some things that are going on throughout the year, specifically conferences. You found a an article online, from class Central, that online learning conferences. And I was surprised, I’m always surprised when I see lists of conferences. And just because of how many are out there and, and the timing and stuff like that. There’s just there’s so many of them available in higher ed in K 12, especially K 12. But there’s so much stuff that’s available for professional development. Yeah. And as we look at these, were you and I, I thought we attended a significant number of conferences mad This is nothing.

Brent Warner
Now there’s like hundreds and hundreds on this list, or I don’t know how many is like 150 or 160, or something like that. So is there a ton of these different conferences, and a lot of them are still online, right. And so that’s kind of the cool thing is like, Hey, if you’re if you’re starting to, you know, maybe your New Year’s resolution was to attend a different conference or, you know, learn something new that you hadn’t done before, whatever else it is, these might be good options, you will provide a link to this in in the show notes. But if you go to class central.com and type in online learning conferences, you’ll be able to find this huge list of them. But anyways, I thought, you know, Tim, you and I kind of we have a few that we regularly go to but there might be a couple of other interesting ones worth checking out. I thought I would start off with the big one that I go to every year, which is cue coming up in March. So that’s going to be March 16 17th and 18th out in Palm Springs. It’s just so much fun. You know, teachers last year, people kind of got back together and it was just a great time to see everybody to really kind of see what people are doing, how they’re approaching things differently now that they’re semi coming back in person. Sorry, these conferences are online. The cue is in person and online. So you get you know, you’ll have to kind of check through for which ones work for you. But anyways, I really really I’m a big, big fan of cue and so this one is an outstanding conference. It’s coming up in a couple of months and so if you’re interested in going to that, it might be worth looking into and seeing if it’s an option for you and usually depending on every school is different but it does happen to fall pretty close to ons Spring Break for me every year anyways, so, so cues, the first one that I’m looking at this year.

Tim Van Norman
Nice. I’m actually pushing my first one out a little further. And that is in June, there’s the online teaching conference for California Community Colleges. It’s back in Long Beach. And it’s, it’s a really neat conference that is all about online teaching. Specifically in California community colleges, they’ll have all kinds of things about it went last year, absolutely love it. When it’s in person, it’s one of those weird parts is it’s about online teaching, and they don’t have an online component. So what frankly, for me, that’s good. Because if it was an online component, I probably wouldn’t attend. It just it’s hard to do that. But for me, mentally, I’m, I’m one of those that does very well in person. So that’s the first one I’m hoping to go to this year, that is the 21st of June. And then in July, right after that, and the two are usually very close together, is Instructure Con, Canvas is coming back in person, and they are going to be in Denver. Oh, that’s so it’s a couple of days conference. It’s, they’re expecting probably 4000 people, that’s pretty big. So that’s a pretty big conference there. You can sign up for it already. There’s lots of speaking opportunities. They’re really trying to make this a huge conference. And it’s a really good conference. A little expensive, at least, our book, but, but it usually is an incredibly conference to go to. And that’s the 26th of July.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I do. I mean, this is just a little side gripe of not necessarily about Canvas necessarily, although, possibly as well, or instructors, like these conferences, do you know that they’re talking to teachers and having teachers pay to come? Like, these prices are starting to get astronomical. And I mean, it’s like our school, we have some, some nice funding for professional development, which is great, depending, you know, in different schools will be different. But I also kind of think, like, Come on, guys. Like we’re we are mostly appealing to teachers on teachers budgets. Right. And, and it’s, it’s, you know, it’s it’s an issue, I think that these, some of these conferences need to come to grips with a little bit. But, but regardless, that doesn’t mean instructor Khan, from what I understand is outstanding. And it is like a really like, you get your money’s worth from what I hear. But at the same time, it’s like, sometimes it’s a pinch to get like through the door. If that makes sense. Yeah. So what else do you got go into,

Tim Van Norman
oh, one that I just attended. And hope to be back next year, especially since I believe it’s Anaheim this time. So right around the corner from us, is duchy. So it’s always the weekend, basically the week after Thanksgiving, right. And this time it was in Sacramento, like I said, just went there. Now, you know, that was a month ago now. But Anaheim it’s a really good conference. Especially if you’re a teacher is good, but it’s more for like the coordinators, right? And, and the people who are doing other things, not just teaching a class, this is a little bit bigger, a higher level conference. Because the reason I say that is because if you’re a teacher, you’re jealous of everything that people talk about. Because they’re gonna talk about how, oh, in this class, we did all of these things, and you’re gonna be sitting there going, but I can’t make that happen. And but from my perspective, I love it because I’m sitting there and I’m going, okay, so if I put these pieces together in this way, I can accomplish what I’m looking to do. Yeah. And somebody else has done it, and I get a hold of somebody and, and I had people from this last conference contacting me already saying, Hey, you talked about this, how does that work? What could we do? Can we implement it and stuff like that? So it’s a really neat, it’s a smaller conference. Definitely not the 4000 people that Instructure Con is, but it’s a really neat conference to go to, and get really good insight into what is happening at colleges, universities. It typically is called California, California, higher education. But there are people that will come from outside of that too. But it’s it’s a really Good conference for that. Yeah, we’ve

Brent Warner
talked about. We’ve talked about duchy a few times in the past. And that’s D, E, T, C, H E. So I think they changed what that acronym stands for. It’s now it’s a drivers of educational technology, California higher education, right? Or it used to be directors of educational technology or something like that. I haven’t made it still to this time, I can’t believe it at this point. Because I’ve been, I’ve been co chair of online education for a couple of years now. You know, all these things. But like, the issue for me, and this is just purely me is just, by the time it comes around, I’m so overwhelmed with all the other things that I have to do. And we’re kind of stepping into finals and all of that stuff, where it’s like, okay, like, am I going to take a weekend off in the end of November. And so one of these times, I am going to get out there, and I’m going to do it because I really want to go, but it’s just, it’s never lined up very well for me yet. So. So duchy are on my radar. Secret, though, I’m not going to go next year, because I’m going to be in a different country. So there’s a little announcement for the show. I’m going on my sabbatical, it was approved. And so I will not be nice. I will not be able to go to some of these conferences. I could maybe I could log in. If it’s online. I don’t know. I’ll have to check on that. But anyways, yeah, so. Oh, and also the show will continue. But, yes,

Tim Van Norman
we’re working on those details out. Don’t

Brent Warner
worry about that. I mean, that was not, that was not meant to be an announcement of any problems with the show that was just, you know, part of the higher ed thing, right. And so, so anyways, we’re going to that. So I’m gonna throw in one last one here, Tim, which doesn’t have a date yet. But I just thought was kind of an interesting looking one. And it’s called the serious play conference. And it looks like, and I’m not totally sure, you know, the dates have not been announced yet. So I’m not 100% sure about everything. But basically, what’s going on here is that this conference is about really understanding, you know, this idea of gaming and instructional design and teaching game design and using games in, in school and in higher education and training and all these types of things. So, so I am interested to see what this is about and what the deal is here. Because this is a cool area that just seems like it has some interesting potential. And there are some very interesting people doing research and in all this area about how to gamify more things, and how to put in game based mechanics into learning and all those types of things. So no dates yet, I think it looks like they’re still doing calls for proposals. So it might, you know, it might be a smaller conference, because some of these are planned out really thoroughly up a full year or more in advanced. But anyways, the serious play conference. And again, we’ll have links to these in the show notes after everything as well. So there is a list and we’ll have this will have the link to the spreadsheet with 160 different conferences on here. It’s pretty cool, because it’s in the it’s in the spreadsheet. So you can just say, Oh, do I want to find higher end ones? Do I want to find which dates am I going to be available? Where are they at right? And so you can do a pretty pretty quick and easy way to find out what you’re looking for. And something that’s going to fit into what you’re what you’re wanting and what your needs are. So lots and lots of conferences, start planning early. And I think you should be able to find something that’s going to work for you.

Tim Van Norman
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about Canvas hidden gems, and the 2023 conferences. For more information about this show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.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 the higher ed tech podcast.com. And let us know your thoughts. Let me just get a point out. You’re talking about junk mail. And like I went and looked in the junk mail. And there’s so many junk mail things that we get in there and I’m like, Oh, I didn’t see all of these. I hope no legit messages came through. There’s definitely a lot of junk messages that come through us. So if you cannot find that, there are some other ways to find us as well. But but if you do have ideas for future shows you can you can send them to us there or in some of the other ways that we might share in a moment.

Tim Van Norman
For everybody at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by the IVC Training Center in IVC in a 322 or contact me directly at T van norman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And Oh Tim, we should also add in Flex week you’re going to be doing present presentations I’m going to be doing presentation So, if you’re at IVC, and you’re listening to the show, jump onto ivc.edu/flex, I think lax and people can go get a list of all the different presentations. I think that’s public facing. So absolutely. So you can go take a look at what’s being offered what’s valuable to you. If you’re, if you’re on campus and you want to say hi, we’ll both be around during flex week. So we’ll be good to hear from you. And if you do, if you’re not gonna go, you can still find out find me and reach out to me about the show. And I’m struggling with some of the social medias these days, but I am on LinkedIn at Brent G Warner.

Tim Van Norman
So 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 Happy New Year, everybody