Live Content in Canvas: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, more

So, after a bumpy start (Canvas rejects Twitter widgets), I finally got a good set of dynamic content pages set up in my practice Canvas course. I made it public, so this link will take you there: Growth Mindset Playground. I found a hack to make the Twitter work after all (weird, but functional), plus it's easy to do YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, Blogger, and (my personal favorite!) Inoreader.

I don't really have any interest in using Canvas for a "course," and I don't have any interest in creating content in there, but these live content pages are different. Instead of creating content inside Canvas (I far prefer other publishing platforms), I am creating and curating content in real spaces on the Internet, and that content is then automatically displayed in Canvas. I don't have to do anything: it's automatic!

So, when I use Twitter, the tweets show up in Canvas. When I add a new video to the YouTube playlist, the playlist is updated. When I add new images to the Flickr album, they show up in Canvas. When I bookmark with Diigo, it's in Canvas. New Blogger blog post? It's in Canvas. New RSS items? Inoreader will display them in Canvas, along with other social network content, including Google+ and Facebook.

Some other formats I tried did not work because Canvas rejects javascript. That is frustrating (one of the main reasons I like Blogger is that it is very javascript-friendly), but I'm still very pleased with the live content sources that do work! And, of course, I am very happy that I can make the course pages public so that everybody can see how it works and decide what might be useful for their own Canvas courses.

Why live content?

To me, live content is something extremely important to include in an online course. Using live pages, you give the students a steady stream of new content to explore. This might be content that the instructor(s) create/curate, or you can have the students also participate in creating and/or curating the content as well. It all depends on the goals you have for your course!

In future posts, I'll have more to say about these specific content sources and also about content creation and curation. For now, though, I am really happy that I was able to get all this live content up and running. Even better: I am so glad to be able to share the pages with everybody... that was never possible in D2L!

Course Redesign Update: May 8 - Library, La Fontaine

I worked mostly on La Fontaine today, along with developing library pages for my sources.

La Fontaine Unit. It took a chunk of time (almost the whole day today), but I am very happy with the La Fontaine unit! I decided to use a children's version of La Fontaine in English verse, and then some fables from an actual translation of La Fontaine into English (La Fontaine's fable output is HUGE, so choosing what fables to include was not easy). Lots of illustrations, too: I used an illustrated edition of Larned; for the Wright translation, I drew on my huge collection of Aesop illustrations at Flickr. I hope the students will enjoy this one! I still need to proofread and add the notes, but the texts come from good online sources so I'm guessing the proofreading will be easy, and writing the notes on Aesop is always fun. I'll work on that tomorrow maybe! Meanwhile, it feels wonderful to be doing more with Aesop. There is the Classical Aesop unit available for Week 2, and now at the end of the semester, there is another chance at Aesop with La Fontaine as a European option in Week 14. I'll also be doing an English Aesop in Prose and Verse as an option for British Isles in Week 12! So, for people who like Aesop (and a lot of the students really like Aesop), they will get an in-depth knowledge that was not possible in the old version of the class. Here is an illustration from the Larned book:

Library pages. Each time I create a new unit, I create a post for the text source for that unit (or posts if the unit draws on multiple sources, as happens occasionally). When I create the post, it's very barebones, just the title, authors, and year of publication, plus a link to my online source. Later, though, I go back through these posts and expand on them, adding links to other online sources along with audiobook versions if available. It is so exciting to see the variety of formats in which the public domain materials are available! My reason for doing this is that I can imagine some students might want to read on their Kindle or using a Kindle app on another device, or they might want to grab a PDF and mark it up with a PDF reader on a tablet (I use GoodReader on my iPad), or they might want to listen to an audio version. Best of all, they might want to explore more of the book, beyond just the stories I selected for the unit. By finding different formats and linking to them, I want to make it easy for students to read and explore using whatever devices they prefer. BYOD! You can see the Library pages I have created so far (Blogger labels make them easy to find), and I was especially excited to discover this Lit2Go project at University of South Florida's College of Education. In a word: WOW. 

Adventures (and Misadventures) with Janux

Unexpectedly, it looks like a good portion of my free time this semester will be taken up with a really terrible digital tool, Janux, the new (and VERY expensive!) MOOC software platform that my school has built. There is a course I really really REALLY want to take, but the terrible software is making me regret my decision to commit to the course. But I am committed, and I will see it through. I'll post an update once a week here about how the tool is working ... or, rather, not working. This will definitely cut back on my Digital Tools postings, but I will make sure to post about Janux as a kind of round-up of my latest (mis)adventures.

Of course I created a blog to get started, since I have to have a blog for any project I am doing. How would I keep track of things without a blog?
JANUX History of Science

I am posting in there regularly, so I created labels to organize my stuff:

ASSIGNMENTS: These are my actual class assignments, and I am reposting them in the dismally CLOSED Janux system... when the system allows me to post, that is. (See troubleshooting diary below.)

VIDEO NOTES: I am recording my notes for the course videos in my blog. I would never trust my notes to this buggy software platform (as it wants me to do), nor do I see any value at all at keeping my notes private. So, I'm posting them in my blog. I just wish I could embed the videos that go with them. It may be possible to do that, but I am doubtful. Waiting to find out.

EMAIL: Since the instructor of the course is a fantastic communicator with many years of online teaching experience (he and I started out teaching online at the same time!), I am recording my thoughts about his emails here since I know I will get some good ideas for communicating with my own students. His emails are the best by far from any instructor of any MOOC I have taken.

SUNDIALS: I've already started a new project thanks to this course - Latin sundial inscriptions! Although I'll be blogging about that at my long-term Bestiaria Latina blog, I'll crosspost here too. It's good to have a class-related project to work on when I give up on Janux in frustration. Which leads me to the final label...

DIARY: This is where I am posting documentation about my frustrations with the system, software troubleshooting, etc. It is just depressing, but by including screenshots and other details, I hope I can make it useful for the Janux developers. So far, every one of my Janux sessions has ended up abruptly in complete frustration, not what I would expect from a platform for which there is an annual budget of almost a million dollars and which was supposedly tested with actual courses last fall. Sigh.

So, I'll have more to say in future weekly round-ups here, but it was useful to spell out my plan. Plus, I will be learning some more things about using Blogger here which should help me get some good ideas for how I can encourage my students to start using Blogger next fall in my classes. There is a lot of overlap between what I am doing for Kerry's course and what my own students do, and no surprise: Kerry and I first built our courses together, and we had so much good back-and-forth as we did that! My whole approach to revision and the project calendar, for example, all comes from Kerry's insights then.

My absolute #1 goal is to get them to open up the video content for the course so that it can be shared and embedded elsewhere; right now, only the promo video is at YouTube. You can get a sense from just this video of how fabulous Kerry is and what a great course he has created.

I am pretty sure he would want to share the videos as widely as possible given all that he has done to make the History of Science Collections available to all — just look at this OU History of Science Collections Flickr stream for example! Wow! That's the kind of sharing I would to see for the videos too. Fingers crossed... maybe I will have good news about that next week.