Categories for Internet

Masterpiece Canvas

Accepting Assignments Online

By James Bowles |

Welcome to Masterpiece Canvas! In this episode we’ll be learning why accepting assignments online can be a valuable tool for us and how to setup your assignment in Canvas.

Accepting assignments online benefit us in the following ways:

  • Assignments are turned in to a single location.
  • The Learning Management System (LMS) manages due dates and flags late work.
  • The LMS automatically identifies the assignment author.
  • The LMS allows for online grading.
  • More!

Check out this handy Canvas Guide for Creating an assignment online and enabling online submission!

This video will also give you an additional overview of Canvas Assignments.

Tips for online assignments

The following tips can help you and your students be successful in completing and submitting online assignments.

  • Create a low-stakes assignment to allow students to practice submitting an assignment. Check out the student guide for submitting online assignments.
  • Be consistent with assignment naming and include academic language. For example Assignment 1: Informative Speech or Assignment 2: Persuasive Speech.
  • Be consistent with the assignment instructions. Include a description of the assignment and your expectations for full credit. A bulleted list is a very clear way to approach this.
  • Don’t put due dates in the assignment title nor the assignment instructions. Canvas has an additional field dedicated to the due date and will automatically notify students when assignments are approaching their due date.
  • Provide ample time for students to complete the assignment in a potentially new modality. This may be the first time your students are submitting an assignment online.
  • Consider permitting various forms of assignment submission like file uploads and video submission.

You can learn more about the many things you can do with online assignments in Canvas by visiting the Canvas Instructor Guides.

TED and the CTL Teaching Team

By Shelley Rodrigo |

The CTL Teaching Team events have really taken off during the past couple of weeks. We’ve had the CIS folks at both S&D and Red Mtn., sharing their expertise and teaching us all how to navigate the new interfaces of the MS Office 2007 suite.

On Monday Paul Valach introduced TED: Ideas Worth Spreading to a few of us. If you ever decide you want a guest speaker for your class, face-to-face or online, TED is the place to start looking. (more…)

Software As a Service and Service With A Smile

By Jeffrey Anderson |

More and more traditional desktop applications are finding ways of living on the web via the Web 2.0 hype. (Please bear in mind that I’m going with the flow of people who are classifying the next generation of web applications with this sometimes publicly scorned misnomer). What this means is that software that you normally have to purchase from a retail store contained in a shrink-wrapped box or download an installer file from a website can now be hosted by the developer on a web page. I suppose this is good and bad for a few reasons:

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