Mini-tip Monday: Canvas Pages

I have decided to post a “mini-tip,” a bite-sized piece of information or suggestion that has helped me streamline or improve my teaching, on Mondays. For the next several weeks, these will specifically be about moving to remote learning amid the Covid19 crisis. The hope is that I can keep this going once things are back to normal.

Today’s mini-tip is about Canvas Pages. I have been using Zoom to deliver my lectures synchronously, and Canvas to communicate with my students otherwise. All homework, lecture notes, lecture videos, etc. are posted on Canvas. One consequence of moving online is that there is a whole flurry of information that needs to be communicated to students related to every class period, e.g., class recording, notes, any related hw due that day, summary exercises*, etc.

Even though I’m hosting synchronous classes, I am trying to post extra resources for students who cannot make it to synchronous lectures for various reasons (e.g., students who are in vastly different time-zones) and thus can’t take advantage of the option to interrupt me and ask questions in class.

All this being said, this means that I needed a way to provide them with all of this information in one, easily accessible, user-friendly place. Enter Canvas Pages!

I’ve set up a “Module” in Canvas called “Online Classes,” which contains a Canvas “Page” for each class session that I’ve taught. Here’s a visual of how that looks. The title for each Page is just the date of the lecture.

 

The green tick marks in front of the Pages indicate that these Pages are published.

Once you click on each Page, I have the following template set up. I fill in the relevant information after each class session.

In this class session, we will be talking about Section [section number]: [section title] from the textbook.

Topics and Learning Objectives:

[List of topics and Objectives]

Before you come to class:

[Readings they should do before class and/or problems they should work on before coming to class.]

Links to:

– Class Notes, Class Recording, Summary Exercise, any other resources.

Not every class session needs all of this information, but it is helpful to me to have a template, so I don’t miss anything. Here’s an example from last Monday.

I hope this is helpful for other people who are transitioning their classes to an online remote-learning format. Please let me know if you have any questions about my set up and/or any ideas to make it better!

 

Stay safe and sane!

*I will do a separate mini-tip Monday on Summary Exercises if you're curious.

Unexpected positives of moving my class online

Yesterday was not a great day for me. Being an extrovert and being stuck at home for days is far from ideal. Combined with the fact that my regularly-scheduled Atlanta-Spring-induced allergy symptoms reared their head yesterday, which meant that I spent most of the day sneezing and sniffling, I really needed a pick-me-up. So I made a list of all of the unexpected positive consequences of moving my class online. Without further ado, and in no particular order, here goes a list of all the good things about this situation:

• I can get up almost an hour later than usual and still make it to class on time.
• I can teach in super comfortable pants. 
• If I need to sneeze in class, I can mute myself and turn off my video for a split second.
• I can teach with a cup of coffee, tea (or hot chocolate!) next to me (I’ve only done this with tea at the moment, but the possibilities are endless!)
• My apple pencil is way more reliable than a whiteboard marker. (White-board markers dry up overnight and without warning!)
• I can highlight my handwritten notes.
• I have more choices for colored writing instruments.

A snapshot from my notes from today.

• My drawings/graphs are much better in Notability than on a whiteboard.
• I can switch between writing on “the board” (i.e. Notability) and showing them a graph on Desmos without having to turn our classroom projector on or off. (Our projector screen covers the whiteboard in the room that I teach in, so I can’t have them both be visible at the same time.)
• Having recorded lectures means that my students can rewatch my lectures as many times as they need.
• My students have notes from class that I wrote, as well as ones they took.
• I can rewatch my own lectures and notice stuff I wouldn’t get to see in a real-life class. I can reflect on what went well, what I can improve for the next lesson, etc. All good things! 
• In watching my lectures, if I catch a mistake or a slip of the tongue, I can point it out afterward. I’m less likely to notice something like that in a real class.
• I can send my class recording to other instructors and get feedback from them. (I did this with a friend after our first class; we both watched each other’s lessons and gave feedback. It was beneficial, 10/10 would recommend.)
• I’m eating lunch at home instead of buying lunch on campus. (This is more generally because of social distancing, but also because when I teach on campus, I tend to buy my lunch on more days than I’d like.)
• Zoom Polls are fantastic! In Monday’s class, I posted a simple poll with two choices: Correct Answer and Incorrect Answer. Only one student picked Incorrect Answer, which would have been awkward for them in a f2f class, but not in an Online one because their votes are anonymous.
• I’m not restricted by classroom design when making students work in groups. I haven’t tried Zoom’s “Breakout rooms” feature yet, but before spring break, I was teaching my class in a room with immovable chairs, which means I could not put students in groups of size greater than 3. Even 3 was uncomfortable, so I mostly made them work individually or in pairs. Now I don’t have that problem anymore!
• I have seen that students who are hesitant to speak up in class even when they know the answer to a question have seemed more comfortable typing the answer in a chat. I might be reading too much into it, but this seems like a big positive.
• I can teach with no shoes on!
• We’ve been having gorgeous weather in Atlanta right now (in the upper sixties/lower seventies). Still, I’m sure I will greatly appreciate not having to get out of the house when the famous Hotlanta summer rolls around.
• Did I mention comfortable clothing?

That’s everything I can think of. Honestly, I’m happily surprised by how long this list turned out to be. Feel free to tell me in the comments if you’ve noticed other positives that I have missed!

Update after first online class.

Hello! I’m back with an update after my first Online class. In short, it went really well! Most of my students actually showed up. This was a surprise, considering that last night, on our instructors’ text chain, I was making contingency plans for the case that literally no one shows up.

Me: Would you record a lecture anyway? How long do you wait for people before you start teaching? What if no one shows up, you wait 5 minutes, you start, and then one student shows up 15 minutes late, realizes you’ve been teaching to an empty classroom for 15 minutes, and then laughs at you for the next 10 minutes?!

Friend: These are new and terrifying things I have not thought about, and now I will not sleep.

Anyway, almost everyone who is in the right time zone showed up, and more than that, the ones who did were actually engaged. They asked and answered questions, responded to Zoom polls, and were generally really good about being engaged (which can I just say, I’m genuinely thankful for? It really made my life easier knowing that all of this hard work in putting my course online isn’t going to waste.)

Anyway, to cut a long story short, here are things that helped me, and please send any ideas you might have to improve this system my way.

• I have set up a recurring Zoom meeting just for our lectures. They already have the meeting ID, but I sent out an email about 10 minutes before with a link to join.
• I am using my laptop to host the meeting, which, in particular, means I’m using my laptop’s webcam for video, and my headphones are connected to my computer too. However, I’m using my iPad to share my screen where I’m writing notes.
• I put up a “warm-up problem” on the screen before I began my class so that students who join early have something to work on. I do this in my IRL classes too. I like to be early in my classroom when I can be, and this helps fill in the awkward gaps before we officially start class.
• I found that using chat is distracting, so I turned off the feature where “participants can privately chat with other participants” but left the “participants can chat with everyone” on, in case some people do not have reliable audio.
• The “Poll” option in Zoom is convenient, but I still have to figure out how to make a poll before class that I can pull up whenever I want.
• I set my lecture meetings to auto-record on Zoom, which means that I do not have to remember to record them every time. This also means that if I join early (which I want to keep doing), it also records the first 10 minutes of silence. This is not a problem, though, since Zoom’s functionality of clipping out the first few minutes is speedy and efficient.

Teaching in the time of Corona

I’ve been wanting to start a blog about my experience teaching undergrads for a while now, but haven’t taken the plunge for various reasons. Now that the Covid19 pandemic is forcing us all to teach online, I thought it might be worthwhile to share how I’m dealing with everything that comes with that. The hope is that this might become a medium to share and receive ideas, or if nothing else, a sense of solidarity.

I’m writing this first post one day before my first online class. I’ll be using Zoom on my laptop for sharing video, and I will be sharing my iPad screen where I’ll be writing down notes for the students to read. I will post an update with how it goes tomorrow!

For now, here’s my list of everything I plan on having on my desk and apps I will be using on my devices while teaching, in no particular order.

• My laptop, with Zoom Web Conferencing installed.
• My iPad Air, with Notability for taking notes, and Desmos for quickly referencing graphs that I can’t draw by hand.
• Apple Pencil.
• My trusty bluetooth earphones with mic.
• A cup of chai (black tea, brewed in hot water and steeped in warm milk)
• Facial tissues.
• A glass of water.
• My handwritten notes: One page with just the outline of the lecture, divided into 5-10 minute chunks, one notebook with detailed notes, solved examples, etc.
• The textbook, just in case.

(Am I going overboard with this? I don’t know, but I’m of the view that being over-prepared is better than being under-prepared.)

Wish me luck!