Recording videos inside Canvas - now HTML5

In a recent Canvas update, recording video in the Announcements area, Discussions, or gradebook, no longer require an update/allowing of Adobe Flash.  The video recording tool now works on HTML5 and Flash no longer needs to be addressed.





This is real important as Flash cannot meet the demands of an ever increasing mobile world.  Flash has not been possible on iOS mobile devices for a long time and YouTube is shifting away from Flash toward HTML5.  Frankly Adobe plans on "killing" Flash by the end of 2020 anyway! All things considered, HTML5 operates with great audio and video capabilities and greater coordination with LTIs (Learning Tools Interoperability).

So if you are someone who wants to create an announcement, record some content to place in a discussion thread, or use the video recording to provide a unique form of feedback to your students, HTML5 will be used from this point on, in the Canvas platform. At this point BigBlueButton still requires the use of Flash - though I am hoping that changes at some point!

Setting due dates, and available from and available to times

Instructure Canvas is the LMS for all virtual classroom activities.  A great way to keep your students on track is to set due dates.  Also, you may wish to have something open (available) for only a certain time period during your course.  This tutorial shows how to set the Due Date and Available From and To dates to items in your course.




Setting due dates for assignments will automatically populate the student's calendar.  Each course defaults to a different color in the student's calendar so one glance provides a quick way to see what is coming due and help plan their time accordingly.  Also, assignment submissions in Canvas can be submitted more than once until you grade.  Assuming you don't want they to continue to submit after the due date, you can lock them out from having this access by setting those dates/times as well.

Giving feedback in Canvas . . . . . . check out the different ways!

Instructure Canvas is the LMS for all virtual classroom activities, for on-ground and online courses.  It is important that you share feedback with students for learning activities, in order for them to improve over the length of the course.  There are a number of different ways you can provide feedback, depending on whether you need just words, examples, or demonstrations.  This tutorial shows you some ways to provide feedback to your students in Canvas.

There are built-in feedback areas where you can type text, attach a file, provide audio (speech to text), or video comments to your students right inside the Canvas gradebook.




Providing personal and detailed feedback in a timely fashion is important to students, as this can help them perform later in the course.  Canvas has a number of easy ways to provide this feedback to your students!

-Provide feedback
-Summative feedback
-Formative feedback
-Explanations

Canvas is here - but it changes every 3 weeks - what about Release Notes

Instructure Canvas is the new LMS used by the College.  Different from the previous LMS that had different "versions" available for its users, Canvas has only one version and every institution is on the same one.

Canvas changes its "instance" every 3 weeks.  So, there are smaller more frequent changes, but it is still nice to be able to stay on top of things, follow the changes and be prepared to adapt to these changes.  However, it you don't know what is happening, it can be a bit challenging.  Canvas produces "Release Notes" - this tutorial shows how you can access those release notes and learn about recent changes, what is on the drawing board and about subscribing so you can be alerted to the upcoming instance updates.




There are multiple changes in each update.  Some are related to "back-office" IT configuration, others related to the content areas, sometimes gradebook functionality improvements, different tools that are added or moved to a different location, or updates to the mobile apps.