Adding Apps to Canvas (LTI) Deep Dive

There are a number of apps that can be added to Canvas making the student experience richer. You can access math, music, and other LTI tools and many are free. You can also add Google Apps and Office 365 if you have accounts. PHM users have Google accounts so you are all set. You may or may not have your own Office 365 account. If your content has material available to you in Word documents you can add the Office 365 LTI and insert them directly into your modules, pages, and anything that has the editor directly without the need to download and upload into your files. You can embed directly. Of course, you can always upload your Word documents into Google Drive and insert them in that manner as well.
Adding Apps LTI

Google Drive Video Upload - Update

As of yesterday, posting a video clip to a Google Drive Slide Presentation just got a whole lot easier and way better. (This works on Slides only.) If you saw my January 21 post, where I demoed how to post a video the "cool" way by hyperlinking an image, you can now insert the video directly onto a slide using the "insert" tool in the tool bar. You could always insert a video but only from the Internet or YouTube. You still have to initially upload the video file to Drive but now you can search your Google Drive and place it directly into your presentation. The purpose for doing this is to cut the ties completely with YouTube to help protect your students from accessing YouTube from your posted videos.
Google Drive Video Insert (New and improved by Google)

Course Card GIF

This video screencast is focused on making GIFs for your course cards. It works like posting images on your cards but instead of an image you load a GIF. It is a short movie of sorts probably 10 seconds in length, or so. You can find your own or actually build one with the LICEcap free GIF builder. Download the free program and you are up and running. The color tint overlay is still in play but they are working on making a clear overlay soon.
Course Card GIF

Note Anywhere and Visor - Chrome Extensions

I was alerted by TeacherCast of a couple of Chrome Extensions that could come in handy. The first one is Note Anywhere. Students may add a sticky note to any web page or document, even Canvas, and when the page is closed or refreshed the note remains. The second one could be very useful for students who have tracking problems or just more trouble tracking on web pages on the Chromebook. It is Visor and works like an adjustable visor that can be moved as students read down the page.
Note Anywhere and Visor

Question Banks - Deep Dive

This is another "Deep Dive" video tutorial. These three 99second videos feature making and using Canvas Question Banks. If you build your quizzes using question banks and label them correctly in a way that makes sense you can build your quizzes around them so that each quiz that your students take will be randomized from a particular question bank. For example make up more questions than you want on the test, say 20, and have the test choose 10 from that bank. If you do a retake, the retake will automatically choose another group or a mixed group of questions from your bank. You can set the point values and also choose specific questions that you want every test to include such as vocabulary or a must-have important concept.
Question Banks P1
Question Banks P2
Question Banks P3

Google Apps - Canvas Deep Dive

This post is a "Deep Dive" into Canvas and the jury is still out as to how handy this will be in the long run. This trick is designed to take "clicks" out of your postings to Canvas. It makes use of Google Drive and makes it possible to either post a link, like you usually do, or embed a document without actually getting the iFrame embed code. It is a one click stop for linking or embedding a Google document or video into Canvas.
Google Apps LTI P1
Google Apps LTI P2

Announcements - Closed for Comments

Our district has made a change in how Announcements are posting and that is by default they are closed for comments. If you want to open or close yours on demand you have to do this little trick.
Closed for Comments Announcements

Teacher Kit / Student Callout

Again, there are tons of class management apps available at no cost (in app purchases, of course) to teachers but my choice for a number of years has been Teacher Kit. The only feature I use, and there are many such as emailing directly to parents, is the seating chart and Student Callout features. After I take individual photos of my students at the start of the school year I can place the chart any way I like. I email the screen shot from my iPad to myself on my school desktop and then have it for print, subs, sub desktop, etc. After downloading the app to my phone I can use the Student Callout as I walk around the room during discussions. There is some initial setup at the start of the year but it pays off over the entire year. You can even move students into a class and out as their schedule changes.
Teacher Kit

Google Drive Seating Chart - Deep Dive

I believe the best choice in Google Drive for making and using a seating chart lies with Slides. You can automatically move the student around the page without any changes. You can also link that student to his/her personal performance Google Form Sheet and it could be shared with the parent in real time.
Individual Student Report  - Google Drive Seating Chart

Google Doc Seating Chart

This post is connected to using Google Docs to make up your class seating chart. There are tons of seating chart/class management apps out there that are probably much better at doing this but I wanted to explore just how Google could be used to accomplish it as we are familiar with the Google platform.
Google Doc Seating Chart