communication

Canvas is full of tools you can use to provide rich, timely feedback to students. In this post, we want to break down the three most impactful methods of giving feedback to students through their work. Goal After reading, your goal is to provide feedback that is actionable, specific, and accessible using tools in Canvas. Rubrics Yes, the “R” word again. Rubrics are flexible and powerful in giving students feedback on their work. They break down individual elements of the assignment and give you a chance to score and give feedback on each element individually. Instead of a single score...

Seesaw blogs are a great way to showcase the work your students are doing in the classroom. By engaging with an authentic audience of their classmates and parents, students are encouraged to complete better work and to get real feedback from their peers. Blogs can also create a space for students to share their thoughts and ideas, their special interests, and to celebrate one another. Seesaw Blogs can be used for: Showcasing student work (VIDEO: Seesaw Wow Work! Intro for Students) Responding to readings or writing prompts Publishing writing pieces Showcasing final projects Sharing fun creations Social media space How to...

Where am I? Where to next? How do I get there? Time and time again, quality feedback has proven to be a powerful tool to use in the classroom. With a 0.73 effect size on John Hattie’s list of influences related to student achievement, almost double the hinge point of 0.4, the impact of providing quality feedback to students cannot be ignored.  Quality Feedback The type of feedback that is given to students is important. Students need to be able to reflect on where they are, where they need to go, and how they get there. Grant Wiggins, researcher and author...

New Analytics has a lot of new interesting features that let you track what your students have or have not been doing in a course. We’ve already written about messaging by overall course grade, but one of the newest additions in features is the ability to message students by activity in the course, not just by grade. You can use this to target students that overlooked a certain assignment or contact those not looking at important aspects of your course. You can open New Analytics from the left hand menu. To message students by activity, go to the Weekly Online...

How many of your students are not keeping up with their Seesaw assignments? How many parents actually know which assignments their student still needs to turn in? Since Seesaw isn’t designed to provide that feedback, I needed a way to let both students and parents know which assignments were complete. I also wanted it to motivate students. I decided to add a reward chart to each student’s journal page and update it with digital stickers to show their progress. Add a Reward Chart as a Student Post Create a new Post Student work and choose Drawing. Once in the drawing template, insert your reward...

If you are like me, you are using Announcements in Canvas frequently to keep students up to date on important information. They’re great because students are notified whenever one is sent from the course. I can manage communication from one location rather than going between Canvas and Gmail. There are two downsides: some students have turned their notifications off and they’re not displayed anywhere publicly when students log into the course. There is a fix for that! To add your most recent course Announcements to the top of your Home page, follow the steps below. In your course, go to...

Google Meet offers a way to call phone numbers from a meeting in progress for people who cannot join by video. This is also a way to make phone calls to families or parents without giving out our personal number. Once you have your Meet started, you can call a phone directly using the Add People option in the People menu. Change the settings to Call and then type in the phone number you want to call. The recipient will be placed right into the Meet room via their phone. When they hang up after the conversation, repeat for the...

A little-known trick for communicating is sending a text message to an email address. Cell carriers will deliver that message to the email account from the phone. Plus, when the recipient replies, it will be delivered back to the sender’s phone! This can help close communication gaps with families without reliable internet access but who carry cell phones. Each cell carrier has a different email address, so start by getting the parent (or student) to contact you first. This can be the tricky part, to get the parent to send you the message first. Sending a Message Each phone is...

Research has shown that in order for feedback to be most effective it needs to be given immediately rather than days, weeks or months later. Fully-online feedback can often be repetitive and time consuming when you’re trying give clear, constructive comments. In this post, I want to share three options to streamline how you provide detailed feedback.  Canvas Rubrics Canvas Speedgrader Comments: Voice to Text, Audio Recording or Video Recording Create a master lists of comments in a spreadsheet of Google Keep Canvas Rubrics Canvas rubrics are tools where you can set up criteria in a score sheet that automatically populates...

The Canvas gradebook allows you to create quick email lists of students who don’t complete an assignment or score below a certain threshold. You can do the same but at the course level by total grade instead of assignment by assignment. In this example, we’ll send a message to students with a score below a 65% (failing). In your Canvas course, click on New Analytics in the left-hand menu. It’s probably toward the bottom of the screen. This page loads weekly activity in the course by default. Use the arrow at the top to change to Course Grade. This screen...

The featured image is a flickr photo by Joe The Goat Farmer shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. Email. That word alone may make you break out into a cold sweat for one of two reasons: A) you’re always aware of it, or B) you’re behind on it. Some studies are showing that email is one of the highest producers of anxiety in the workplace, and it has been since the early 2000’s. So, how do we curb our email? This year, Elkhart teachers and students have access to Google Hangouts. It’s a video and text chat service linked...