Canvas/Tutorial

Getting Started with Canvas

Posted on by Morgan Harris
📺 To orient yourself with your Canvs shell courses, watch our Getting Started with Canvas video tutorial and/or consult the following guide:

📋 To copy from a prior course, click “Import Existing Content” on the right, then select “Copy a Canvas Course” from the dropdown menu. Or, feel free to start from scratch with this minimalist template we’ve built for you.

🏠 By default, Syllabus is set as your course homepage. Recent Announcements automatically appear at the top (you can turn this off in Settings).

🧑‍🏫 Use this text area to display your course expectations, policies, etc. Click “Edit” to modify/replace this placeholder text and then click “Update Syllabus” to apply changes.

✅ When you have an assignment ready for students, publish it with a due date – it will appear not only in the auto-populated, chronologically arranged Course Summary below but also in the students’ Dashboard and Calendar.

👀 The only other pages students see are Modules and Grades – all others are hidden to minimize distraction (feel free to modify under Settings > Navigation). Important note: Even though the Assignments, Quizzes, Files, etc. pages are invisible to students, you can use them as the teacher and students can access any assignment, quiz, file, etc. housed inside a published module.

📚 Organize course content using Modules. Think of Modules as your table of contents. From this one page, you can create and organize all course components.

⚖️ If you’d like to employ a grade weighting scheme, create Assignment Groups and assign weights.

💯 To encourage mindful posting practices, the Academic Department Heads have asked that Canvas courses default to manual grade posting. You may change this under Gradebook settings if you prefer automatic grade posting.

🙈 We strongly recommend you Hide Unpublished Assignments in your Gradebook view options.

🧑‍🎓 To add your students to the course, click “Email All Students” in ChoateSIS, copy the list, open People, click “+People” and paste the list. (If you teach multiple sections, specify the correct section!)

🚀 Once you are 100% ready to launch, click “Publish” and your students will receive their course invitations.

🧑‍💻 Any questions? For technical issues, email helpdesk@choate.edu or message Lisa McGloin on Teams. For pedagogical inquiries, ping Morgan or Viva on Teams.

AI/TECtonic

Getting Acquainted with AI

Posted on by Morgan Harris

This summer, TECtonic participants have been exploring the rapidly changing world of AI, the unique demands it will be putting on us as educators, and the institutional vision required to shepherd our community through this uncertain future. Here are some of the resources we’ve found most helpful and would like to share with the Choate community:

First, the latest Educator’s Notebook newsletter is chock full of essential questions and resources to help us face the reality of what AI means for learning as we prepare for this school year and beyond.

At the newly launched Learning on Purpose SubStack, Eric Hudson has published two pieces with guiding questions, essential principles, and hands-on experiments worthy of your consideration.

At the One Useful Thing SubStack, Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick writes regularly about using AI to implement effective teaching strategies in classrooms. Mollick and wife Lilach also just released this must-watch video series:

Ethan and Lilach Mollick’s supremely accessible and practical 10-minute video series!
Get a sneak peek into how Khan Academy is utilizing GPT-4 to empower students and teachers alike to unleash their full human potential in the learning process.

We are helping beta test an exciting new project billed as “conversational AI for students to talk about their work.”  If you are intrigued by this demo, please visit https://sherpalabs.co/ and click the button “Sign Up with Invite Code” on the top right hand corner.  Sign up with your Choate credentials, enter the Invite code SPEAKONIT and create your first conversation with Sherpa!
Made by the creators of The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin’s urgent talk calls our attention to the dark sides of this emerging technology, and offers some suggestions for wisely navigating through the existential challenges.
Followup to The AI Dilemma in response to viewers’ questions.
Indian mystic Sadhguru offers sage advice for how we should orient ourselves in the age of AI, inviting us to consider what uniquely human capacities–beyond the intellectual pursuits that have come to define academia–we might tap into if we let the machines do what they do best.
Brendan Ozawa-de Silva offers inspiring insights from the frontiers of embodied education experiments at Emory University.

Canvas

Canvas Implementation Guidelines

Posted on by Morgan Harris

Although official Choate policy only stipulates “major assignments and assessments,” the Academic Technology team and our partners in The Learning Center strongly recommend posting all assignments with their respective due dates in Canvas. This will set your students up for success because your assignments will appear on their Canvas Calendars and To-Do lists, allowing them to better visualize and prioritize their work, and it will ultimately make life easier for you as a teacher and adviser. If you ever need to change the due date for an assignment, you can simply drag it to a new date in your own Calendar and the change will be reflected everywhere. Finally, please ensure that any electronic readings, notes, or handouts are linked or attached to their respective assignments (which also automatically stores them in Files).

While using the Gradebook is also not required by school policy, we encourage you use it because it is fully integrated to your existing Canvas workflow, saving you precious time. Just ask any of your colleagues who have leaned in to Canvas — the more you treat Canvas as your hub for everything, the better experience you will have with it, and the more mental resources you’ll have available for your most impactful interpersonal interactions. (If you do choose to use the Gradebook, please be sure to hide totals in student grade summaries in order to comply with our school policy.)

When it comes to structuring and styling your courses, rest assured you have complete autonomy – Canvas is powerful and flexible enough that it can look and feel however you wish. That said, the shell courses distributed by your department heads are intentionally constructed with a minimalist aesthetic – almost all Course Navigation links except Home and Modules are disabled by default, with the Home page set to Syllabus so that if students navigate to your page, they see your course expectations and an auto-populated list of published assignments organized by due date. Any of your assignments can still use items that may be housed inside those hidden areas, but in almost all cases, you should treat such areas as your own space where you do not need to worry about how things appear to students. As long as an individual file, etc. is designated as “published,” it will be visible inside its respective assignment. Of course, if you would like to re-enable any of the Course Navigation links, you can easily do so in Settings.

Need some help getting started? Please head over to our Canvas Resources page, and mark your calendars for the two in-person Canvas workshops we’ll be holding during Opening Days:
-Wednesday, August 23 1:30-4pm in Elman (New Faculty only)
-Tuesday, August 29 3-5pm (All Faculty welcome)

TECtonic

TECtonic

Posted on by Morgan Harris

Over the last decade, emergent technology has transformed the Choate experience in and beyond the classroom. Creating podcasts to tell stories in new ways, employing augmented reality to make material come alive, collaboratively annotating texts and conducting asynchronous video discussion–these are just some of the myriad ways you all have sparked the joy of learning among your students! 

While the educational benefits of technology may be obvious, the dark sides are all too real–stress, distraction, loneliness and addiction contribute to our ever-worsening mental health crisis. Given this promise and peril, how might we educators mindfully embrace technology with an eye toward individual and collective well-being? Not only as a tool to enhance academic studies, but as an everlasting part of an integrated, fulfilling life? Can technology help unleash our uniquely human capacity to see our students as whole people? 

We invite you to grapple with these questions and more at TECtonic–a new conference exploring the intersection of Technology, Education and Contemplation that’s designed to be 100% compatible with your summer plans. Unlike traditional conferences where you drink from a firehose for several days and return burned out, we’ll give you not only the time to marinate on the big ideas, but also the resources to translate your inspiration into practical application, holding your hand through the ins-and-outs of conscious technology implementation.

We’ve taken the content that would fit into a jam-packed three day conference and spread it out over six self-paced weeks that you can work through from wherever you are this summer. There will be a brief launch meeting at the end of the school year to orient ourselves and share our respective goals, and then from June 26 through August 4:

  • TUNE IN – Experience the joy of co-creating an online learning community! Once a week at your leisure, listen to and collaboratively annotate a TECcast interview of an inspiring colleague, augmented by meditative visuals of our beautiful campus evolving through each season. Post a brief Flip response noting any big ideas you are contemplating, and any tools or techniques you might like to implement in and beyond your classroom.
  • HONE YOUR CRAFT – Let us dream and build with you! Through a combination of curated resources (for all experience levels) and weekly 20 min. 1-1 Academic Tech consults (in-person or remote, scheduled at your convenience), apply your inspiration and insights into creative assignments and classroom activities that suit your teaching style. Once you have something you’re proud of, showcase your creations with the TECtonic group and, if so inspired, with your academic department. 
    Viva and Morgan are here to help you:
    • Build or refine your Canvas courses
    • Take the power back with Apple Classroom 
    • Gamify your classroom with Kahoot! and Gimkit
    • Streamline your workflow with keyboard shortcuts and AI assistants
    • Deploy the same community building tools used at TECtonic in your own classes
    • Create anything else you can imagine!
  • COME TOGETHER – (Optional, for folks in town) On three evenings through the summer (scheduled based on max availability), grab a drink and roast some s’mores while we connect and reflect on our progress.  

To honor your commitment to the art of teaching, we’re investing in you–TECtonic participants will earn $333 for their efforts 🙏 If interested, please complete this Google Form. 

Canvas/Tutorial

Canvas Resources

Posted on by Morgan Harris

Whether you’re making the transition to Canvas and don’t know where to begin, or this ain’t your first rodeo but you want to level up–we’ve got you covered!

YouTube Video Tutorials Playlist

Click the playlist button on the top ☝️ to browse videos.

Additional Support

The Canvas Knowledge Base is extraordinarily comprehensive, easily searchable, and available 24/7.

Canvas Orientation Sessions on 5/10 and 5/17 during the Form/Wellness/College/Advising block (10:40-11:30) in the Staff/Faculty lounge. If you’d like to attend, please complete this quick RSVP form.

5/10 – All About Assignments: Learn everything there is to know about Assignments – how to create them, assign due dates (incl. variable dates for multiple sections!), integrate with other tech tools, and much more. 

5/17 – Mastering Modules: Learn the ins and outs of using Modules to structure your course content. 

👩‍💻Finally, you are always welcome and encouraged to schedule a 1-1 meeting with Viva or Morgan at your convenience. 🧑‍💻