New Attendance tool in Canvas!

Many of you will notice a new Attendance button on the left in your courses.  Attendance uses a system called "Roll Call".  Canvas will calculate the percentage your students are there based on what you click and include it in their total score.

When you first click the button in each course, you'll you'll be asked to "Log in".  Once in the system, you'll see a list of all your students.  You can click "Mark all present" then click on the students that are absent or late.  There's also a grid-view so you can set up a seating chart to take attendance (or so you can learn your students' names!).


The system allows you to set the percent a late arrival is worth, but it's for the whole course (we can't set this for individual tardies yet).  After logging in, you also get a new item in Assignments and a new column in Grades.  Students will not see the Attendance button, just their grade.  You can run a report that gets emailed to you though.  This may have a line item you can share with the student.

This feature is brand new, so I don't know all the ins and outs of it yet.  For example, I'm not sure how the grading works in the final percentage yet.  I think you be able to set the total points for attendance in Assignments and then Canvas will divide the number of days into the points available, giving the percentage.  

This fall will be the first semester using Attendance and be an learning experiment of sorts though.  These guides give more information though:

http://guides.instructure.com/s/2204/m/4152/l/107406-how-do-i-configure-the-roll-call-attendance-tool-for-my-course
[Toward the top, click the link after "NEXT:" to go to the next guide... there are 6 total.  This picture shows this location.]

I'm interested to hear your feedback about the system.  Feel free to let me know, or leave a comment below!

Canvas New Releases!

New Features

Live chat

A new text Chat feature is available.  With this tool (already in your courses) allows you to talk instantly with anyone present.  Contact me if you're interested in learning more about this new feature.

Take attendance

An Attendance tool is also now available.  This is especially useful for inperson and ITV courses.  You can use the tool to take attendance, setup a setting chart to help learn students names, and include attendance as part of the grade.  The Canvas Guides - starting with this guide and several following it, has more details.  Contact eLearning to learn more! 

App Center

Extend your teaching capabilities with new apps the plug directly into your Canvas course.  Available soon, these third-party services can be added to your course or at the department level for several courses (eLearning can also add them to all courses at CCC).  
The LTI/External Tools tab in Settings (if you were familiar with it) will now be called "Apps".   The video after the image gives a nice overview if you're interested in learning more.

An example of an app being used in CCC's Canvas is the YouTube, Khan Academy, and Ted Talks buttons in the Rich Content Editor:

Canvas App Center from Instructure on Vimeo.

And remember, you can hide any of these tools you're not interested in.  Anything on the left in black text is viewable by your students, so hiding unused tools helps them find your course content as well!  This guide will show you how. 

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Regular Release Notes

The next release (which will occur this Saturday, July 13) shouldn't change the way you use Canvas or any of the tools in a major way.  Last release, Jordan talked about big changes to the Discussion board.  If you missed it, be sure to review the previous post.  

For this release we'll see a few new features added to Discussions, Quizzes, LTI/Apps, Profiles, and some admin changes.  Watch or read on to learn more.

07.13.13 - New Release Screencast (CC) from Instructure on Vimeo.

Great talk from US Depart of Ed - Richard Culatta

At InstructureCon2013, Mr. Culatta spoke as a morning keynote.  His talk was also captured at a TEDx conference that I'm sharing here.  He has a lot of great inspirational information for education.

One thing that struck me is an example he gave during the speech.  Teachers replaced the word "technology" with the word "pencil" in common reasons why technology isn't useful in education.  It's a great opening to a great talk about the importance and methods of incorporating technology into education as a whole.

I encourage you to rewind and watch the whole thing.

Ahhhh technology!

Believe it or not, as I browse the web I occasionally stumble upon something fun or noteworthy that isn't actually in Canvas.  Today, it's a comic from xkcd called "The Pace of Modern Life".  Enjoy.

Changes in Discussions causing problems

The new update has created some issues for faculty who use Discussions extensively in their course.

Jennifer Dalby from Lake Washington Tech has some good design suggestions to work around this issue for now.

"For my course, which is actually a faculty learning community, I created a Module, added text headers to sort the topic categories, and added the topics I wanted to feature."

Read on...