Month: January 2017

Blog Index / January 8, 2017

Welcome to the first Blog Index post of 2017! I’ve marked new posts below in bold.

Spring 2017 Reports

Widgets and Other Dynamic Content

Openness, Sharing, and Connectedness

Posts about Students

Posts about Instructors

Teaching Writing

Canvas Class Announcements

Some Practical Canvas Advice

Grading with Canvas

And here’s one of the growth mindset cats from last week’s posts:

I like to learn.
What’s YOUR superpower?

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

Friday: Spring Classes Begin … in the Snow

Normally I would have started classes one week early, which would be on Monday, January 9… but it was a “snow day” in Norman and campus was closed. Here’s a tweet from OU Libraries:

So, I figured I would see if there were any snowbound students who were interested in getting a head start on the semester, and sure enough: five students have logged on and gotten started, and there are even some blogs up and running! You can see a live stream of their first blog post assignment: Favorite Place(s). This screenshot shows the post as of 5PM on Friday… and the live stream link (powered by the mighty Inoreader) will show the new posts automatically. I’ll say more about that in a later post.

The students’ blogs are the most important part of the class, and the Favorite Place(s) is a fun way to get started, making sure they feel comfortable including images in their posts. Most students have not blogged before, and this post is a good way to get started, with the focus really on sharing something that is personal but not getting into introduction mode yet (the intro post comes a bit later in the week, after they’ve had some more practice blogging).

Meanwhile, about Canvas, the only thing I can say is that… there is nothing to say! As the students do the assignments, they do “Declarations” to take their points, and it’s all working exactly as it should, with no questions from the students at all. Which is great! I then see those points show up in the Gradebook automatically; in this class, for example, there are 2 students who have started, and one student has already finished 5 of the Orientation week assignments. With 46 students in one class and 48 in the other, the Gradebook is going to get very busy very soon, even though it is quiet right now.

So, a snow day, a slow start… everything is looking good at the end of this Friday, and I am excited to see what next week will bring!

Instead of a growth cat, I thought I would post a Latin cat … in honor of the snow!

Cogitato hiems quam longa sit.
Think how long the winter is.

 

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

The Power of a Student Project Archive

So, after the API excitement of yesterday, we can return to our regularly scheduled program: more fun in the Widget Warehouse! Today I want to write about my favorite widget of all: the Student Storybooks.

Sharing student work. This is not a widget that someone would want to use in their class (unlike the other widgets, which I always hope might be useful to others!), but I wanted to share this widget as an example of how to continually share and promote student work in a class. For me, the student project archive is the single most important resource in inspiring each new semester’s students, and the randomizing widget allows me to include hundreds of past projects, letting them come up at random again and again so that the new students will get to see lots of great work done by students in the past. It’s also fun for me to see, too, because all these projects are connected with happy memories of semesters gone by as I watched those former students create their projects.

Growing the archive. At the beginning of each semester, I harvest up the projects from last semester and add them to the widget, and I also check the old items in the widget to see if any student has taken their project offline. This time, I found that three projects were offline now, so I removed them from the widget. I am really fortunate that most students choose to leave their work online! (In a separate post, I’ll need to explain how I am going to cope with the coming demise of the old Google Sites now that the new and completely retooled Google Sites has become available.)

Widgets big and small. As usual, I make 400-pixel-wide and 200-pixel-wide versions of the widget. You can see the 400-pixel version here on the homepage of our class wiki for example, and you can see the 200-pixel version in the sidebar of the class announcements blog. Those show both classes, and I also have class-specific versions, as you can see here for Myth-Folklore and for Indian Epics.

Explore! One of the first assignments each semester is for students to explore past Storybooks, getting ideas and inspiration for their own projects. Seeing work by past students is the single best way to help new students get started, far more so than any instructions or descriptions I might provide of the project: Storybook Favorites.

So, this post is both about the power of random for increasing awareness and for promoting curiosity… and it is also about the power of student-to-student learning. Students of the past can also contribute to the students of today, and the more you can weave a project archive into your class environment, the stronger the presence of those past students will be!

My peers can be my teachers.

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

Power of API | Power of Community

So, today was my best Canvas day ever: thanks to some help from Stefanie Sanders at the Canvas Community, I found my way to the API work done by James Jones… including an API/GoogleSheet script that allowed me to download all my course quiz dates in a Google spreadsheet so that I could do a global date update. That was even better than the (very clunky) method for global updates in D2L. Real tools for real data: WOW.

Last August, I spent a solid 7 hours manually updating my quiz dates (making errors along the way too), and I expected to spend 7 hours again this semester… but thanks to Stefanie and James, that task took less than 30 minutes. And I got to learn about the powers of APIs! I’ve always been frustrated that I could not get my data out of an LMS to work on it in a spreadsheet… but now I can! Based on James’s elegant and powerful examples, I hope to learn a lot more about the Canvas API in the months to come.

So, I can report that my Canvas classes are up and running… a full day early! Which means all day Thursday and all day Friday I can focus all my attention on the really important stuff: preparing materials for my students.

Let me summarize quickly what I managed to get done today… which will also come in handy in August when I need to do this all over again. I hope I don’t leave anything out in my summary here:

1. Update custom URLS. I logged on to Canvas and found the URLs for my two Spring courses; I then used those to update the custom URLs I use for my own convenience: Myth.MythFolklore.net and India.MythFolklore.net. Those were pointing to the Fall versions of the classes, but now they point to the Spring versions! Those are public, open courses, so just click and look. 🙂

2. Fall to Spring copy. I went to my Myth-Folklore Spring class and copied over all the content from the Fall class.

3. Get API token. I then generated an API token that I could use for the quiz date update. To do that, I went to my Canvas Account Settings and then generated a new access token.

4. Update all quiz dates. Next, I followed James Jones’s excellent instructions for exporting my course quiz dates to a spreadsheet so that I could update them all. The instructions worked flawlessly. I created an additional page to use at the spreadsheet for the formula I used to shift all the dates (compensating for Thanksgiving versus Spring Break is the only tricky part). In less than 30 minutes, I had updated all 448 dates in the course (211 quizzes, most of which have a due date and an available until date, and some of which also have available from date).

5. Tweak Myth-Folklore. Then, I worked on some fixes to the Spring Myth-Folklore course, but they were easy:
Publish: I had to publish the course.
Settings: I had to adjust the LTI I use for the homepage redirect to go to the wiki for the Spring semester.
Announcements: I had to adjust the links for the hide/show right menu on the announcements page.
Course image: I chose a new course image — it’s a Walter Crane illustration this semester. (And geez, I hope they fix the awful course image color overlay problem soon.)

Course Name: I tweaked the display name of the course since I learned (to my dismay) that the Canvas public course search works only for the Course Name; it does not search the course description (argh!).
Start Date: I adjusted the start date to open my class one week ahead of schedule (I really encourage students to get a head start if possible).
Gradebook. I had to click “show totals as points” and “arrange columns by date.”
… And besides that, I think everything else copied over just fine from the previous semester. Those are the only changes I had to make!

6. Copy Myth-Folklore to India. Then, I was able to copy Spring Myth-Folklore into Spring India (I design the courses so that the Canvas shells are identical). I then made all the same adjustments as for Myth-Folklore, plus I had to change the image randomizer on the Syllabus page to display India images (instead of Myth-Folklore images like on the Myth-Folklore syllabus page).

And that’s it… I have a whole extra day now to work on the real stuff! I thought I would be spending all day manually adjusting dates, but thanks to James Jones and the power of the API, I took care of that while drinking my morning coffee. THANK YOU so much to James Jones for sharing his scripts, and thanks also to Stefanie for making sure that I knew about that. The power of sharing: it is an awesome power… which is why I will diligently keep posting in this blog all semester long, sharing everything I learn!

I like to learn.
What’s YOUR superpower?

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

Widgets to Awaken Curiosity

For today’s post, I want to follow up on yesterday’s post about my Freebookapalooza widget, where I emphasized random-for-discoverability. Today I will focus on two similar widgets (one for each of the two classes I teach) — the Myth-Folklore Images and Indian Epics Images widgets — but with an emphasis this time on curiosity, and the importance of curiosity in the learning process.

Let me begin with the widgets. On the left, you see the Myth-Folklore widget which draws at random on images from the UnTextbook from which students choose their reading in the class each week (it includes some India images also because India is one of the regions included in the class). Meanwhile, on the right, you see an Indian Epics images which draws on a wide range of art related to the characters in the epics and other Indian stories; again, in that class, students are choosing their readings from the huge range of options that are available. So, each time the page loads here, you will see other images at random (although my students sometimes joke that it is a divine sign if they do, by chance, see the same image twice in a row):

 These are the 200-pixel-wide versions that I can use in blog sidebars; there are also 400-pixel-wide versions available which you can see in Canvas for example: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics.

Importantly, it is not only an image that you see, with the images being just some kind of eye candy as so often happens in the students’ other online worlds (and even, sad to say, in other academic content online). Instead, each image has a link where you can learn more: if you are curious, just click! The links in the Myth-Folklore images go to specific stories in the online UnTextbook for class, where students choose a different reading unit each week (there are 100 reading units overall). The links for the Indian Epics images go to pages at a class website which is a repository of images, and which is also home to the public domain reference editions of both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that the students are using in the class — and yes, that class is also based on the students choosing their own reading from week to week.

And that, then, is the key: how will the students CHOOSE what to read? how will they decide what they want to learn in the class?

For me, curiosity is the learning motivator that is most strong, and it is the learning motivator that I try to encourage most in my students. Now, there is a whole range of reasons why students might be curious about things: some students have acquired a kind of conventional, impersonal academic curiosity (although that’s less common than people like to assume), but all students have elements of purely personal curiosity that they can build on. That, in turn, is fascinating for me, because as I learn about the students’ personal curiosities, I get to know more about them as people, far more so than if I were the one making all the decisions about what to read and learn in the class.

So, I use widgets like these, and others, woven into as many class spaces as possible (daily announcements, assignment pages, class resource websites), in order to try to excite the students’ curiosity, and I also encourage them in their blogs to make their curiosity visible to others, explaining why they make the reading choices they do and what their favorite stories are, while also sharing their favorite images in their blog posts too.

In future posts, I’ll have more to say about curiosity and the high value I place on it in all my course designs, but for now let me close with a great post from Maha Bali responding to the recent flurry of concern about fake news stories and the larger questions that arise for us as educators. I really appreciated the emphasis she put on curiosity, and the danger of IN-curiosity, here:

Fake News: Not Your Main Problem by Maha Bali (writing at DMLCentral). I highly recommend the whole article; here is a key passage for me:

The real problem isn’t that some sources produce fake news. The problem is that young people (and grown, otherwise reasonable adults!) are not prepared, morally, socially, and emotionally to interpret this critically. Martin Weller has wondered if we are at an age of unenlightenment, and Sherri Spelic has brought up the issue of incuriosity about others — that’s more an attitude and an orientation than just a skill. It’s not something we switch on. It takes years to build, especially with so much going against us.

And here is the item that Maha cites from Sherri Spelic (writing at Medium): Incuriosity is a thing, and why not? She concludes with this optimistic paragraph that I endorse wholeheartedly:

Complexity is never going to be everybody’s friend. But complexity met with curiosity can become a source of momentum or points of departure; opportunities to broaden rather than narrow our fabulous humanity.

So, why do I use all these randomizing widgets? It’s one way, among many, to “broaden our fabulous humanity.”

And of course curiosity is a major motif in the Growth Mindset Cats collection! Here’s one — and, yes, the famous kitten-with-apples video is included in that post, but I will restrain myself from including it here. Although, if  you are curious, it is just a click away. 🙂

Confront the unknown with curiosity.

 

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

Progress at the Canvas Widget Warehouse

I’m back in action for 2017 (whoo-hoo!), and you can check out the 2016 Round-Up for goings on at this blog last year.

And now, the new post: a Widget Warehouse update!

Working on my Canvas Widget Warehouse turned out to be a wonderful project for over the winter break. Much of the work involved in creating widgets is mechanical: creating lists of links, batch processing images, generating HTML tables, etc. So, I was able to work on those kinds of tasks while listening to audiobooks (my favorites were Michael Scott’s Nicolas Flamel series, Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series, and — best of all — Frank Wilczek’s own reading of A Beautiful Question). In my posts here for this week, I’ll share some of the highlights of the holiday widget adventure, describing some of the widgets themselves and also how this widget-production process works as a content management strategy.

Free Mythology and Folklore books online. The widget I am most excited about is the Freebookapalooza widget. It features the free online books — over 900 of them — that I collected last summer at my Freebookapalooza blog. Each item in the widget features the author and title for each book, plus an image — it might be an image of the book cover, or perhaps an illustration from the book or, failing those, an image that is related to the book’s contents. You can see the widget in action here at the Canvas widget page, and you can see the 200-pixel version in the sidebar of the Freebookapalooza blog. Plus, I can include the widget right here; you’ll see a new book at random each time the page loads.

Widgets and Sub-Widgets. Because the blog itself is divided into regional sections, I also created widgets for the specific regions: African, Asian-Pacific, Biblical, British-Celtic, Classical, European, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Native American. Having a specifically Classical widget, for example, is useful to me because I can feature those books in my Bestiaria Latina blog sidebar.

Spreadsheet Magic. Creating the regional widgets is not extra work: I just have an extra column in the spreadsheet that generates the HTML tables, and I filter based on that column to get the HTML tables I need for each widget. I could create other flags as well, such as thematic collections (fairy tales, ghost stories, Aesop, etc.); creating thematic collections is a project I am contemplating for next summer, and I am also excited to add more books to the project next summer also.

Widgets for Discoverability. One of the biggest obstacles in a content collection like this is discoverability. If I have over 900 books here, how can I help connect students with the books they would really enjoy and/or find useful for class? That is why I am so excited about this new widget! By having the randomizing widget in the sidebar of my class announcements blog, I hope to catch the students’ attention at random with items that are of interest; the dynamic power of random and the use of images make it far more powerful than a static list of links. I’ll also be using the widget as part of the “Extra Reading” option that is available to the students each week where I hope they will choose a book to explore and blog about, and the widget will be a key feature in the Week 2 assignment where students explore the overall resources for the class. In addition, I can add the randomizer to the region-specific pages at the blog, as here: Greece and Rome.

Content is only really useful if it reaches the students, and having this dynamic, visual way of presenting the content will help to connect students with the books they might really want to read. Given that reading, and the love of reading, is a key feature of my class, I am really glad to have the power of random to help my students explore the free online book library! I’ll report back on how it is going as the semester gets underway. Classes start officially on January 17, and I hope to have my classes ready to go for an early start on January 9… so I should have some preliminary information to report in just a few weeks from now. 🙂

~ ~ ~

A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge. That is why I read so much. — Tyrion Lannister, in Game of Thrones (more)

 

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

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