Canvas Tips: Embedding a Randomizer in Canvas

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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Canvas does not let you just copy-and-paste javascript into a Page, which is very frustrating compared to the way I can just copy-and-paste javsacripts into a blog post.

The way to get around that is for the javascript to sit inside an HTML page (a webpage), which you can then insert into a Canvas Page using something called "iframe" which is used for all kinds of embedding. If you have ever embedded a YouTube video, you've used iframe to do that. In the same way that YouTube gives you the iframe embed code to use, I've prepared iframe code for you to use to embed any of my javascript randomizers in Canvas. You can see all the randomizers here: Laura's Widget Warehouse.

So, for example, if you want to use the random Mindset Cats, here is the iframe code:

<iframe src="https://widgets.lauragibbs.net/canvas/gmcatsjava.html" width="450" height="800"></iframe>

As you can see, with the iframe you have to specify the width and height of the iframe space, which is not optimal for layout, but it works.

So, if you want to add those Cats to any Canvas Page, or a Discussion Broad prompt, anywhere you see the Canvas editor, you can do that by clicking on the "insert media" button (bottom row, second from left), and then pasting the iframe code into the embed tab of that media dialogue box:

Presto: CATS!

This is the same process you can use for any kind of embedding where the website gives you an iframe type of embedding code, like NPR for example. You can include an audio NPR story in the same way; here's how you can see the iframe embed code for an NPR piece: Manhattan is a Lenape Word.

And here it is embedded in the blog post; you can embed just the same way in a Canvas Page!

Canvas Tips: Custom Dashboard

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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This is a small thing, but it makes a big difference if your school is like my school and pops future courses into your Course Dashboard, cluttering up the view. The key is this: star what you want in the Dashboard view, and unstar what you don't.

Click Courses in your left navigation menu.
Click All Courses link.
You can see all your courses there (current, past, future) and star or unstar what you want to see or not see.

You can teach your students to do the same! Here is the Canvas Dashboard tip I share with my students.

Canvas Tips: Course Card Images

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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It's a small thing, but honestly one of my favorite things: I love getting to choose an image for each of my course cards. Here's what I have this semester, in a screenshot from the very first assignment students do at the start of the course; I make sure to include links there for where they can find out more about the images I picked for the semester:

It's easy! To choose a course card image for your course, just go to your course Settings: Course Details and choose an image. You can browse CC-licensed images at Unsplash or upload an image from your computer. You can also choose a name (a nickname) for your course, which is very helpful if you have user-unfriendly course naming conventions at your school.

Even better: students can also give their own nicknames to courses! Here are the tips I share with students about configuring their Dashboard to choose nicknames for courses, remove the color overlay, and other Dashboard details: Canvas Dashboard.

Canvas Tips: Open Courses: Visibility - Public

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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When I first learned about Canvas, years before my school adopted Canvas as their LMS, I was impressed that you could create open courses, real websites with real URLs open to the public. There was nothing like that in D2L, which we used as our LMS for many years. Right from the start, the creators of Canvas wanted people to be able to make their content available on the open Internet. The student-specific parts of the courses are not public: discussions, quizzes, etc. But the content, syllabus, the modules themselves: all of that can be shared if you choose public visibility.

To see how that works, here is one of my courses set up in Canvas with public visibility: Myth.MythFolklore.net. You can see the Modules where my students record their work week by week, but if you click on one of the Quiz-Declarations, you will not be able to access it; Quizzes, Discussion Board, etc., are just for enrolled students, but the actual course content is available, and directly linkable. So, for example, here is the page where you can see my students' projects as a slideshow: Projects.

In addition, you can configure that visibility with a Creative Commons license; you can find out more about CC licenses here: CreativeCommons.org.

To make your course publicly visible, go to Settings: Course Details, then scroll down to where you can select License and Visibility:

Don't forget to click Update Course Details when you're done.

If these options are not available at your school, see if you can persuade your school administration to enable them. We need to be sharing all we can now in this difficult time. Sharing through Canvas Commons is one way to share content, but this is another, very valuable way to share your content because it is something you can link to (as I linked to my course and specific pages above), so you can share links with colleagues anywhere, including colleagues who do not use Canvas.

Share your course materials with links: that's how we will get a better educational Internet. Especially if your school does not offer any other type of web hosting, you can share your Canvas course content by choosing the public visibility option.

Canvas Tips: Suggestion Box in Canvas

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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We all need feedback, and it's really helpful to get feedback from students about how a class is going. You can do that with periodic surveys, and you might also want to set a Suggestion Box that students can use any time. Students might be shy to tell you there is a problem with the class, but the anonymous Suggestion Box allows them to share their ideas with you without hesitation.

I've got a Suggestion Box in each of my Canvas course spaces, and I've added to the navigation menu too. You can see how that looks here: Myth-Folklore Suggestion Box.

The way I do this is by creating a Google Form that I then add to the Canvas menu by using the Redirect Tool Canvas app. I actually use the same Form for all my classes, so I just have to create one Form, and then I can use the Form in multiple course spaces from semester to semester.

Google Form

To create a Google Form, log on to Google with your Google account, and then type Form.new. For step by step information about creating your form, see: Google Forms Help.

I'd suggest configuring the email notification so you'll know when someone has left a suggestion. Click on Responses, and then click "Get email notifications."

All you need when you're done is to get the link address for your form. Click on Send, and choose the Link icon. You'll copy that address to use in Canvas.

Canvas Redirect Tool App

The Redirect Tool App is how you can add an external webpage (a website, a blog, a form, etc.) to your Canvas menu. Here's how it works:

1. Go to Canvas Settings.
2. Go to Apps.
3. In Filter by Name box, type: Redirect. Click on the icon.
4. Click Add App.
5. Then fill in the dialogue box:

Name: Suggestions (or whatever you want)
URL: copy the URL from the Google Form send: link
Force Open: UNCHECK this box
Course Navigation: CHECK this box
Account/User Navigation: leave these unchecked

6. Click Add App. You're done!

Canvas Tips: Due Date / Available-Until Grace Period

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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When my school switched to Canvas, one of my favorite things was that I could set a soft deadline and a hard deadline for each assignment. (In our previous LMS, you could have the soft/hard deadline for some assignments, but not for quizzes, and quizzes are the only kind of assignments I use, a.k.a. Gradebook Declarations.)

So, for every assignment in my class, I set a due date in Canvas, and that is the date that shows up in the Canvas Calendar. These due dates are at midnight. So, for example, if an assignment is due on Tuesday, I set the due date at Tuesday midnight.

Then, I set the available-until date until noon the next day, which gives the students what I call a "grace period," a kind of no-questions-asked extension. So, for example, that assignment due on Tuesday at midnight continues to be available until noon on Wednesday.

This works great for me. It keeps the students on track to finish their work... but honestly, it doesn't matter if they turn something in at midnight or 1AM or 2AM. There's nothing special about midnight. By making it available until noon the next day, it gives them a chance to finish up if something happened unexpectedly. (If that grace period is not enough, I have extra credit options they can use as make-up.)

When Canvas launched the new Gradebook, I ran into serious problems with my system: Canvas started putting red "late" labels on the work my students turned in during the grace period. What a mess! Here the students were doing exactly what I told them to do, using the grace period as needed to complete their work (good!), but Canvas was putting a punitive red label on their work (bad!). Luckily for me, James Jones wrote a script that I can run every week to remove all those wrong labels; you can see how that works here: Remove Gradebook Labels.

Canvas Tips: Adjust All Assignment Dates

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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James Jones is the API Guru of the Canvas Community, and among his many "Canvancements," the one I depend on most is his script to Adjust All Assignment Dates. I use a microassignments approach in my classes, where students choose from about a dozen assignments every week, so I have over 200 items in my Gradebook. Using James's script, I can see all my assignment dates (due dates and available-until dates) in a Google Sheet and adjust the dates there. Plus I can also change the names of assignments too, changing as needed and making sure I'm consistent.

When you copy a course in Canvas, it offers a single date adjustment but that doesn't work for me: in the Fall semester the Thanksgiving Break comes at a different time during the semester than Spring Break, which throws my dates off. With James's spreadsheet-based approach, that's easy to manage!

And now, in the midst of Spring 2020, if you need to be changing dates in an existing course, this tool might make it easier for you, depending on how many dates you need to change. For me, this tool is so much faster and also more reliable than making manual adjustments!

James provides details instructions on the Adjust All Assignment Dates page, and he has created several videos to help you do that! Here's a playlist of the videos:

Since I love using Google Sheets and formulas in Google sheets, this approach to managing dates/times works great for me!

Here's a screenshot of what that looks like; so useful! You will probably find other useful scripts in the complete list of James's Canvancements.

Canvas Tips: Remove Gradebook Labels

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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In the new version of the Canvas Gradebook, Canvas started automatically adding "Late" and "Missing" labels to student assignments. The only way to turn these off is by-student-by-assignment; you cannot turn off the labels for a specific assignment, and you cannot turn off the labels for an entire course.

For me, these labels are a huge problem. I use a course design where students choose which assignments they want to do (when they don't choose to do an assignment it is NOT "missing"), and I also give them a soft/hard deadline option (as long as they turn something in by the hard deadline, it is NOT "late"). I've written a lot about this problem elsewhere: Canvas and the Botched Gradebook Labels.

Luckily, the API Guru of the Canvas Community, James Jones, has written a javascript that you can use to remove those labels from your Gradebook! You can remove the "missing" labels so that they never show up at all. For the "late" labels, you cannot remove them in advance, but you can remove them after they appear. James has also written up a detailed page explaining how it works: Removing Missing and Late Labels.

James even made a YouTube video to walk you through it:

Canvas Tips: Gradebook Declarations

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My Favorite Canvas Tips

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Gradebook Declarations is a system that I use where students declare their completed work in Canvas; the same system works in any LMS (I've used this approach in both Blackboard and in D2L).

Here's the idea: I create a quiz with one True-False question. The content of the question is a list of requirements for the assignment. The True answer is correct, so when the student answers "true" to the list of requirements, the quiz automatically puts points for them in the Gradebook. Here's an example:

This type of Gradebook activity can work for any assignment where there is an objective checklist allowing the student to confirm that the assignment is complete. The way I do this is with a checklist, not a rubric, and there is no partial credit this way, although you could certainly create a quiz question or series of questions that function like a rubric and/or allowing students to declare partial work for partial credit.

This is the system I use for all the work in my classes; the students do all "grading" (such as it is), while I focus all my efforts on the feedback. I don't use the Gradebook; the students are the ones generating all the Gradebook activity. For more about how all-feedback-no-grades works in my class, here's a chapter I wrote for a forthcoming book about ungrading: Getting Rid of Grades.

Here are just some of the advantages of the Declaration system as I see it:

Students get credit immediately. Students don't have to wait, and they can see their credit accumulating assignment by assignment. For some students, this is highly motivating. It's also a time-saver for me. I'm not "grading" work that doesn't need to be graded, and I can focus my efforts on feedback to help students improve their work in future assignments.

Students get a reminder of key requirements. I am guilty of writing lengthy instructions for assignments. The Declarations, however, are very concise. For students who might have missed something important in the assignment, reading the Declaration gives them a final chance to check their work for completeness.

Students take responsibility for their work. It's not up to me to check that each assignment is complete; that's up to the students. If it turns out later that there's a problem, I can point out to the student that they said the assignment was complete, so they need to make sure to finish up. (Mistakes happen; the Declaration gives me a good basis to talk to students about that.)

The Declaration system establishes trust. I believe that mutual trust is essential for teaching and learning. This system shows the students that I trust them to keep track of their own work. In addition, I hope that students will develop greater trust in themselves by taking on this responsibility.

My Favorite Canvas Tips

As people are getting ready to move classes online, I thought I would share some of my favorite Canvas tips. I don't use Canvas for any of my class content or activities (I prefer blogging; more about blogging), but my students use Canvas to record their grades, and it's also a kind of "home base" since they can find all their classes in Canvas. Click on the title of each tip below for details:

1. Gradebook Declarations. This is a way you can have students record their own work in the Gradebook, getting credit for work they have completed. They get credit right away, and you don't have to do anything. Instead of focusing on grading, you can focus on communicating with your students.
2. Suggestion Box in Canvas. You can include a Suggestion Box in your Canvas menu so that students can leave you feedback about the class. We all need feedback! (It's just a simple Google Form that appears as a Canvas menu item.)
3. Due Date / Available Until: Grace Period. Canvas allows you to have a soft deadline and hard deadline for each assignment; I call the space between those deadlines the "grace period" in case students need a little extra time. (During this crisis, I will probably end up extending the grace period for everything till the end of our semester.)
4. Remove Gradebook Labels. If you are using a grace period, you might want to remove the "late" labels that Canvas applies to work turned in during the grace period; this script removes the labels automatically, and you can also use it to remove "missing" labels that Canvas applies to optional assignments. (Nobody needs Canvas to nag at them right now...)
5. Adjust All Assignment Dates. You can use this tool if you are adjusting dates from one semester to another, and you can also use it if you need to adjust dates in an ongoing class... in case of unexpected events that require rearranging the calendar (like, uh, now!).
6. Open Courses: Visibility - Public. You can open up your course content as public webpages with links you can share. Especially now, when time and resources are in short supply, we need to be sharing our work as much as possible.
7. Course Card Images. One of my favorite things about teaching online is getting to work with images all the time, so of course I love being able to choose a course card image for each of my courses every semester! As students are going to spend more time in Canvas, pick a nice image for your course.
8. Custom Dashboard. This is a quick explanation of how you can use the star/unstar option to display or hide courses in your course Dashboard.
9. Embedding a Twitter Widget in Canvas. This is actually a Canvas course I've built which explains the 3-step process to embed a Twitter widget in Canvas. Twitter4Canvas: Generate Widget Code, Upload Code in a File, and then Insert File into a Canvas Page.
10. Embedding a Randomizer in Canvas. You might be surprised at how easy it is to embed a randomizing widget in Canvas. You can use the same technique to embed other kinds of materials too, like NPR audio, etc.: all you need is a site that gives you an iframe code to use for embedding!