We are looking at designing your course with clarity and we're talking about canvas course organization. I know we have some people still jumping on and joining, but if you could type in the chat whether you right now think that you will be in person or a virtual teacher next year, just so I can get a feel of how heavy we might be one way or the other. So in person or virtual, if you could type that in the chat. If for some reason your chat is not working and you want to come off mic, that's great too.

So I'm seeing lots of in person [Music] and a few virtual. Outstanding. Okay, so the good news is what we're going to be talking about in terms of course organization is really going to work in both settings. But if you have a specific concern with your setting, feel free to always type that in the chat. If you have specific questions about a course that you're planning for the fall and want to talk about your situation specifically, I'll hang on after, and you can ask all the questions you want. I think we have Nikki Daniel in here too, so she will be a great asset in answering some of those questions.

All right, so I am Whitney Barnett. I don't think I've introduced myself yet. I am a personalized learning facilitator for Knox County Schools, and I focus on student ownership and how we empower kids to be engaged in that learning process. One of our biggest lessons learned from last year was how much clarity played a role in their ability to take ownership or their willingness to engage in content. Some of you all might have felt a little bit of that last year too. If things were organized and there was lots of clarity, students had an easier entry point and could be engaged easier.

If we were in a situation where there wasn't tons of planning time and things weren't very clear, and we were doing some things on the fly—which certainly happened—then students had a harder time engaging and having that entry point. So that's what we're going to be focused on as we go forward.

I'm looking at the table of contents, and we'll see if it pops over here in a minute. If not, let me know if you do not see the table of contents. Part one is we're really going to talk about the why, and I've touched on that a little bit—why this clarity is so important. We're going to go a little bit deeper into that, and then in part two, we're going to look at some of the design components for our canvas courses. In part three, we're going to talk reflection and planning, and part four, we're going to look at resources that you have available to you going forward. Again, if you can't see my slides change, please let me know because I'm not seeing it on one device.

All right, we do have a Bitly link for this presentation, and this presentation has quite a bit of information in it, so having your own version of this presentation is going to be helpful. It also has all of the links for resources on the last slide—they will be clickable for you if you have the presentation, so that should help.

Thinking about why clarity is so important, learning should not be a mystery to students. If we are very clear upfront about what is needed and our expectations, they have a much better chance of meeting those expectations. It's when we're not clear that that gets a little wonky. So we're going to look at this in some course organization, making sure that we can ensure the efficiency of learning. I think that's a big piece because planning time is so valuable, and grading time, and all of those things and setting up content is so valuable that we're really going to look at a couple of ways to be more efficient with that. That actually translates into more time spent on content and learning for kids too.

All right, so what students and families really want to know in terms of the learning process are these fundamental five things. This was a graphic that I've included the link to the whole graphic in our resources, but in structure and organization in the UK developed this graphic. Number one, students want to know: What am I supposed to do? When's it due? How did I do on it? Can you help me? And what more can I do? Those are questions that happen all the time. If we think about our design in terms of being able to answer those upfront, it's going to be much easier for the students to engage in that and have little cause to ask those questions.

That doesn't mean they won't ask, right? Like how many times do we give directions and then they turn around and ask that same thing that we just said? But we're gonna talk about clarity and consistency, and the more consistent we are, let's see.

Let's talk about modules a little bit. So we saw a module listed there. There are a couple of key points to keep in mind when we do our modules. You want them to be clear and consistent. You want it to be obvious where students are working from, especially if you have them click the modules tab and you have, you know, let's say it's December and there are five modules already in there of content. Do students know which one to go to? How do they know which one to go to? So making sure that's clear and consistent.

And then the content within a module you want it to be sequential so that it's obvious that students do this and this and this and this. There are a couple of examples right here. So in this first example, the title of the module is Titanic Day Nine, and this is Monday, March 8th. I thought that was an interesting way each module was a day, is the way this teacher organized it, and so it was very sequential. There are numbers; you know, yesterday was Titanic Day Eight, and so it's obvious what story we're on and then what sequential day we're on and specifically what day that might be occurring on the calendar.

And then there were all the things that students were going to do that day. Another example has the listing of the standard and the topic of that particular module. So we're talking about water cycle remediation, and again here's the sequential order. In this case, a teacher had utilized headings so that they had given a pre-assessment, and if you had an 80 or above, this was the activity you were going to do, and then here's another heading where if you scored 79 or below, these were the activities you needed to work through.

Those are a couple of different ways we can organize modules, but really think about how we're naming them and is it obvious where students go next? The other thing that we need to consider is unpublishing content. For me, I was always concerned that students might need it later, so I tended to leave too many things published at once. Students might need it later, but when we're in the middle of some other content, they might not need it in December or in November; they might need it in December or vice versa.

So really think about what do students need to be successful right now, and if it's not something they need to be successful right now, unpublish it. We can always publish it again when it's time to review or when they need access to that content for makeup work or something else. So keep that in mind. Does it make sense to unpublish? That was something I had a hard time doing.

All right, for assignments, we want to make sure that we give as many details as possible. Always write your assignment so that a student who is absent could complete the assignment without much direction from you. This is the beauty of Canvas, and so thinking about that makeup work, putting a little extra effort in on the front end to make it as detailed as possible to include all the links that are necessary. Include that all in the assignment.

Sometimes as a teacher, I may have included some links to the resources within the module somewhere or embedded in a presentation somewhere, but then when it came time to do the assignment, students had a hard time figuring out where that was. So even if you've got them linked somewhere else, it's a good idea to go ahead and put all of those links in the assignment again. That cuts down on that "I couldn't find it" or "I didn't know" all of those things. Again, be consistent and clear. Think about due dates; put due dates on assignments. We're going to see what this does in a minute, but it will throw the assignment on the student calendar, and it'll put it on a to-do list for students. If there's no due date, those things don't happen.

So let's look at an example of that. The other thing, as we talk about due dates, and I'm going to show you right here in a second, is availability dates. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in grading policy, but is there a hard deadline for something? If so, put that on there. Make it available. That doesn't mean you couldn't open it up and change the date if you needed to, but if you're expecting a hard deadline on an assignment, include that in the availability dates.

All right, so in the description, it said something about later missing assignments, and this is what this looks like for students. We can see up here that this particular student did not turn in an argument essay workshop; the due date was October 9th, and it is now missing because there is nothing there, and it gives this student and families who are a part of Canvas that missing designation. This one was late, so it was turned in after the deadline. The assignment was still available; the student turned it in after the due date, and so we get that late piece.

If we go down here, though, we see that there's a missing assignment, but there's no missing designation, so that can occur for a couple of reasons. One is if you don't have a due date, but there is a due date on this one, or if it's an assignment that is no submission. This teacher had created this assignment; she wanted kids to know, "Hey, this assignment is occurring in class," but it was a no submission assignment. There was no electronic submission; it was something that they did in class.

So students can see that when they go to the assignment, there's nothing to submit electronically, but they know that this might—if this is empty, that's something they did not turn in in class, but it doesn't include missing because it doesn't know if the kid turned it in or not. And then, again, we can see another late assignment down here. The other beauty of this is that you can also see comments, so I can tell that the teacher made a comment on this assignment, and I could click there and be able to see those sorts of comments.

So let's look at this in a real-life course. Here we have an asynchronous course that this recording is going to be a part of later, along with some other things that are on here, and I'm in student view, so you'll see what this looks like for students. Here's the home page. On the home page, because there's an assignment over here with a due date, it shows up on the to-do list. When is it? We're not changing slides. Okay, it's changed on both of mine. Anybody else coming in? There you go. Okay, it's just really slow today.

If I click grades over here, this is why including grades and navigation might be important. Oh, that's not what I wanted. Let's go back. It was taking me out of student view and putting me in teacher view.

All right, so as a student, if I go to grades, this is what I see: I see all of the assignments that are published in the class, I see due dates, and I see my score. Again, if it were missing or late, I would see that status right there. You'll see that for this course, none of the assignments have due dates except for this one; that's why that's the one that shows up on that to-do list. Another place students can see those assignments is on the calendar, and so that assignment was due in August. So, on August 1st, when it's due, we can see that in the calendar piece. The other assignments don't show up. I do get a little drop down over here of undated that will show all of the things, but that's not the same as putting it on a calendar and having a deadline. So, if you're a teacher last year who was really struggling to get kids to turn stuff in—which was almost all of us—know that putting those due dates on there can really help communicate to students and families that this needs to be turned in, that there is a deadline.

All right, so if we go back to this presentation, I want to go back just a little bit because I want to talk about this availability date. One thing you might want to think about is how late are you willing to accept an assignment? So, I might make a due date of August 1st for that assignment, but I could make it available until August 15th. So, if a student turned it in after the due date, they would still get the late designation.

The last thing that I'm going to talk about—and then we can hang out and talk specific course questions if you have them—is thinking about grading and grading policies. So, really, we have a push in when we're talking about student ownership of thinking about formative versus summative, and what is the balance in your classroom of formative and summative assignments? How often do students have a chance to improve a grade or improve an assignment? Thinking about what that balance is should be very heavy formative and very light summative, but that balance is going to look a little different for everyone. So, really thinking about your content and thinking about how do I find that balance of formative versus summative, and is this something students can improve on? Because that's going to change your assignment settings and your grading policies and expectations. So, keep that in mind: Is this formative or is this summative, and who's providing the feedback? You know, as we have all of these assignments in there as teachers—and maybe you've got 150 students—it's very difficult to keep up with that feedback. So, utilizing peer feedback as much as possible and then really thinking about in those assignment details, when we were talking earlier, what is the learning target for this assignment? What are the success criteria? How will students know they're successful?

So, if we go back and look at this particular assignment, one of the things that we can see in this particular assignment is I put the success criteria in a rubric. When I go to grade this, it is so much easier for me to look at the success criteria: Did they meet it or did they not meet that success criteria? And give feedback that way. That's very efficient. It's also something students can do to give each other feedback: Did they meet that success criteria or not? Here's what we're looking for specifically.

Let me go out of student view and you can see what this looks like in SpeedGrader as a student. So, here was the assignment; here's specifically what they need to do: they've got to watch, they've got to use a rubric, they've got to complete the note catcher, here's the success criteria, and there's the resources they're going to need. This happens to be a Google Cloud assignment, and so that's why you have this piece down here—that's their actual submission. When I go to SpeedGrader, I have the submission in front of me. I can say "View Rubric," and I'm actually going to drag it over a little bit so I can see it, and then I can just go in here and put points based on that rubric. Now, I'm only using a one-point rubric, so this is very formative: Do you have this or not? Is this—can I see evidence of student ownership from the video? Were you able to label and identify? That's what I'm looking for. It's either there or it's not. If it's not, I do have the option of still providing that feedback, but in terms of grading policies and being very clear and consistent in order to get that efficiency, rubrics are very, very helpful. I use simple one-point rubrics for what is going to make this submission successful. It includes this, this, this, and this. Really talking about that with your kids and putting it in the assignment up front can help as well.

All right, questions about that piece? Okay, if you have any, just put them in the chat; I'm happy to help you and answer those. We've talked about due dates, open dates, and late work. So, when’s it due? How long is it going to be available for students to submit? And then, what is that designation for late work? What is my policy that I want to have on that? I may want to leave it open all semester, but know that you don't have to; you can set that up front. Whatever makes sense for you going forward.

All right, so here is part three, and really thinking about reflection and planning. This is your turn to type in the chat, and we haven't had very many questions, so this is going to give me some feedback on where we're going and where we might need to push in a little bit more. So far, what content has resonated with you? If you could type in the chat box or feel free to come off mute, what content has really resonated with you?

All right, so simplicity, minimization, ease of access—yeah, keeping things clean and simple. We get really excited as teachers—at least some of us—when we can be very creative and think about, oh, what was popular last year? The Bitmoji classrooms! Those are great; graphics are great; kids love graphics. But is it consistent? Is it simple enough? Is it obvious what kids need to do and where they need to click, or is it too busy?

Yeah, let's see—simple rubric, success criteria. You're going to hear rubrics and success criteria out of CNI from now till forever, I think. That's really, really helped us.

All right, so now, as you're thinking about what's one goal that you have for next year for your Canvas course, what's one thing that you would like to do in your Canvas course next year or for this coming year? I guess, yeah, Anthony, you're so right. It's not just for our students in special ed, but really, the things that work for those kids work for all kids. Thinking about how do we support all kids and really thinking about that equity—that's the other thing too. As we go forward and we think about in person, and we think, "Well, we might not need this technology as much," I might not need to put as much on my Canvas course. But if we think about equity of resources, sometimes the only resources our kids have are the ones we give them, and making sure that we have that equity in resources—so don't let that fall back and not think about, am I giving my kids every opportunity to be successful?

All right, so we're seeing some goals: use the Canvas grade book. Kids could still access it, so even if we removed it from the navigation pane from their dashboard, they could still access grades from all their courses. I know it's confusing; I know it's hard for kids and families sometimes to differentiate between Aspen and the grades that they see in Canvas. But just trying to be as clear and consistent up front as possible with, "This is how I'm like." This is like your daily folder, almost. If you think about our elementary kids, when they would come home with the daily folder, this is what would be in the backpack. This is evidence of learning; this is the formative pieces. Although we could still have formative and summative in there, trying to find an analogy for them to get that—and after a year, most of them are getting some practice with that, so it's not quite as difficult.

How for students to find things? Yes, and so thinking about for ourselves: Does this make sense? Is it obvious? If I had a new student in my class right now, is it obvious to that student what they would need to click on? That's what we're looking for: Is it obvious? Because kids are, you know, their brains are going to be everywhere, right? Adding videos for instructions? Yep! Video tours—even if it is also like, if you do a beginning of the year meeting and you're in it virtual and you're able to record it, that's a good thing to put on the front page. Any kind of Google slideshow—like Melody had her slideshow on there—you could walk through that for an upfront piece for your course. So if you do get new students or families, it may be September or October before they realize they can access this content to help students. So, just keeping that in mind: What can help people find it and make it obvious?

Let's see here—that modeling piece—very good! Samples of successful layouts are very helpful. Okay, so we're going to talk about some more of those in a minute in terms of resources.

All right, I'm gonna see if I can pull the chat back up over here; I may have to come back to it. All right, so let's get back to you. Please keep sharing ideas; it's only going to help everyone else in this session.

All right, so we've looked at some reflection pieces and some planning going forward. It sounds like you all have some really great ideas. Here are some more resources to help you in that endeavor. So here is the fundamental five: what students and families really want to know when you're thinking about that beginning of the year tour of your course or you're thinking about how to explain how things are organized. This is a great resource to refer back to—do I answer all of these questions? Because this is what kids and families really want to know.

Another great resource is this best practices for Canvas checklist. All of the content that we've talked about on these slides is in this checklist, and it just makes it a really easy, "Okay, yeah, I think I've got that." It's also a great planning tool as you're thinking about, "Oh, I didn't think about that; I need to be thinking about that as I design."

There is a five-star design process from Canvas, and they've got some resources on there. A lot of what they say is a more in-depth version of what we've talked about in this session. So that consistency, clarity, simplicity—those are all things you'll see in that five-star design from Canvas, so that might be a resource to check out. They've also got a few examples of some design elements in that as well.

An in-depth course evaluation checklist from Instructure goes through anything and everything about a course. So, if you are very much a checklisty person or need a list of items that you're planning, this is your in-depth resource. Now, it's not an Ox County resource, so keep in mind some things may or may not apply.

All right, so Canvas also came out with some teacher appreciation templates. They have a service that designs templates, and you can pay them—districts can pay them money, and they will create these things, and they're great, but it does cost money. A couple of times in the last few years, they have released some for teacher appreciation, and that you can see these here. So you'll see home pages; they're all pretty similar, particularly similar to ones we saw at the beginning of our session. They're going to have a banner, they're going to use buttons, they're going to simplify the navigation pane, thinking about their pages and assignments. You're going to have lots of details on those for students to be successful; those are the things you see there. But that gives you a couple of links to look at some of those templates.

The other thing I will say is if you find a template that is—like sometimes in the Canvas community guides, they will have templates that you can't necessarily download, but they're showcasing. You'll get some ideas from there to create kind of your own homepage. You might see something that you like—a theme or a layout of buttons or something like that that you really like. So even if you can't download the template itself, there are some good ideas embedded in there as well.

All right, so that's our resources. Again, here is the link for this presentation. If you did not get that before, you're going to want to click on that because it has the links to our resources. I'll play it all—it's not going to paste again, but it is a bitly link with canvas underscore clarity, all caps. Ooh, there it went finally! I'm going to post it in the chat one more time.

And then I am going to say thank you! I'm gonna stop the recording, but if you have questions—as you're planning or designing—feel free to hang on, and we will answer those.