Intro: That's okay, everybody! We are live with my dear friends, the Canvas Newscasters. You guys don’t know Eddie and Marcus; they are a couple of my very favorite Canvas users. This is Mark Booth from the Canvas team. You guys are aware that, with everything going on with COVID-19, we're trying to give you some extra special hints, best practices, and tips about how to get up and moving on Canvas really quickly. Nobody's as good at that as the Canvas Casters are! If you're not following them on Twitter, go check them out at Canvas Casters. Follow along with their podcast—I might even call it the unofficial official unofficial podcast of Canvas. It’s awesome, so go give it a listen!

I'm going to hand it over to Eddie and Marcus. They're going to talk today about announcements and how to best communicate with students. Take it away, guys!

Thank you! I appreciate it, Mark. As Mark said, my name is Eddie, the Innovation Coach at Reliant Career Center, just south of Indianapolis, Indiana.

And I'm Marcus Painter, the Coordinator of Digital Learning at Twin Lakes School Corporation, which is up in Monticello, Indiana—just about 20 minutes north of Purdue University. We’re really excited; obviously, we’re the Canvas Casters. Check us out at CanvasBusters.com or at Canvas Casters.

Brian, how’s it going? I’ve got some C9 people in here, which is awesome! Hey, Brad, I see you here as well. Lots of great things going on, obviously, with these webinars. Along with some stuff that happened yesterday, Marcus and I are going to focus on communication, and I'm up first.

So I’d like to share my screen here, Mark, if that’d be awesome.

Announcements: The first thing we're going to talk about is announcements. Now, we've set up a staff toolbelt; it’s kind of in development, but that’s the course I’m going to focus on today mainly because it doesn’t have data. So let’s take a look at our announcements tab here in our course. The first thing you’re going to do is load up your course tile—in this case, my staff toolbelt. Once that is loaded up, the one thing I love the most about using this platform is that it’s kind of a one-stop shop to make an announcement. All staff members are inside this Canvas course, and they have access to Canvas.

As you can see, we’ve been doing some announcements lately as things have gotten crazy over the last week. In the announcements tab over here, in the navigation on the announcements side, you can create an announcement. In this case, to create a new announcement, you’ll just hit the “+ Announcement” button here on the top right-hand side of your screen. From there, you’ll be able to use that rich content editor to put in your message.

Uh-oh, just kind of walking you through here: this is a test announcement. From here, you can add details. You still have access to that rich content editor, which allows you to insert links and any type of photos you’d like to use. The media recorder, which will help, is an excellent way to engage with your staff by including a recorded message.

You can upload documents and files; you can use those select apps—again, like Studio and Google Apps. You also have the option to post questions for people inside the course. You can add additional attachments, set a delay for posting, allow comments, or enable liking.

Okay, so once you’re ready, you can hit “Save,” and the announcement will go live. If notifications are set for the users, that notification will go off on whatever platform they’ve decided. We always recommend the Canvas app to our students because it allows teachers to communicate with them effectively. We use services like Google Voice at some points, but we will be exclusively on Canvas. A lot of our tools and resources are kind of using them as a replacement. Announcements are a great way to do that; we can make an announcement, and they can get notified right away on the Canvas app and respond back.

So when we first launched this site, I created an under-construction announcement. I wanted to show you engagement; this is where we're going to put all our resources, our professional development, and any links. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me! The staff was responding, saying, “Hey, everything looks good! This is great engagement.”

But then I got a message from Brian Menon, who is in here today. He said, “Eddie, I wasn’t thrilled with that.” Whoops! He called me a tool inside the chat—not a big deal. Anyway, I responded back with my message from the Studio, which is my closet upstairs. I said, “You know what, Brian? I guess I am a tool—I’m recording in a closet!” But you can put GIFs and things like that, so it’s a really great engagement piece. We wanted to start with announcements because it’s kind of the one big thing that’s out there that you can use right away.

Marcus, yes, take it away!

Well, what I also like about announcements—and we talked about this with my staff—is that sometimes you don’t necessarily need an assignment, or maybe what you’re giving your students at that moment isn’t an actual assignment within Canvas. So a lot of times, you can just deliver some content in an announcement, and it’s just a lot more efficient and causes less hassle, depending on what your student information system and LMS are doing.

But I wanted to transition to the inbox. It’s very straightforward; it’s super easy to use. Excuse me. Ultimately, here, it’s just basic email built in, right? I’ve selected a course that, again, like Eddie said, has teachers as the students. This happens to be a state testing training course that I created for Twin Lakes. The inbox is very straightforward and intuitive.

One of the big things we’re hearing all over the place of late is that, if you go to distance learning or extended e-learning, what we do know is that the longer this continues, it’s even more important to find creative ways to interact with our students because we no longer get to be face-to-face in the conventional way. So messaging is a really simple, easy way to do that.

So, I just clicked on Inbox in the left navigation. It’s as simple as composing an email sort of message. You can obviously click and start typing and get autofill of students within this course, or you can click on the little contact button there on the right and sort of click and choose folks that way. Obviously, you’ll add a subject and then compose your message.

Now, I’m really in love with the media recorder within this as well, and Eddie spoke to it about within announcements. The media recorder is sort of embedded in a lot of different aspects of Canvas, and if we’re talking about having that personalized experience, the media recorder is a great tool for that.

Could I easily compose a message to the entire course or selected folks within the course, and then hit my media recorder button, let that guy load, and then record a video? In fact, I did this this morning. I did it in my announcement to my eighth-grade technology kids. I just hit “Start Recording” and talked to them for about five or six minutes about what’s been happening and gave them a little bit of a rundown on what we were going to do in class for the day. The media recorder instance is within the composing of a message, which is a really great option.

So, let's say you know, concrete example: I'm within my course, I've got five or six kids who have not completed the work for the day or the week. I can go ahead and message them here. There's another way to do it, but this is one way. I can message them, record a quick video. I think we all would agree that speaking to our kids, letting them see us and hear us, is going to be more efficient for us, for sure, and definitely more engaging than a lengthy email message to them. So, I really love the messaging option, but I love the built-in media recorder there. Edwards is really good, Marcus.

So, we've talked about announcements, yeah, I'm here. We talked about announcements; we've also talked about inbox, which is fantastic. And I love—I didn't mean to put to you—that's what's happening here, which is, "Hey, wait, wait! Points, high five! Let's have that other way!" Right? Wow, you're all ready? Yes! High five! We did it! We did it! Kind of. Okay, sorry, really too much; it should be too much for the elbows! We should be elbowing, right? Ooh, you're right! Social distancing. Again, another Canvas person here: Pat Tink. Glad to see everybody's engaged in the weird stream. But we wanted to also touch upon a few more things. I know a few people came in the chat and said, "As a newbie, you're going way too fast," so try your best to slow down a little bit. I think our goal was to show you the full communication side in a brief thirty minutes, but it will be recorded, so you will have the option to go back and watch these at your own pace, which is why we love it.

So, I wanted to just touch briefly on "Message Students Who." And this, so Mark, if you shared my screen, that'd be amazing! Hugh, great transitional message! So smooth! "Message Students Who," which is a feature that you have in the gradebook, which is really cool. It's enough—I didn't know a whole lot about it until a couple of months ago at my first Q&A meeting when it was on, and then someone said, "Have you ever tried Message Students Who?" I'm like, "No!" And then, honestly, my mind was blown. You could do—this different or new in Canvas just blows my mind, 'cause I'm a newbie! So, we've only had it for about—hmm, since we purchased it. So, it's been an interesting time since we started using it and testing it.

"Message Students Who" in the gradebook—so, under courses, find your gradebook. The three-dot option, let's hear your assignment menu. Right next to your assignment titles, you will find "Message Students," which is a really cool feature that will allow you to either message students who haven't submitted yet, who haven't been graded yet, or scored less than a specific amount or more than a specific amount on a specific assignment. So, if you know that, "Look, hey, I've got two kids in here that haven't submitted this assignment," then, hey, probably a good idea to send them a message to communicate with them and let them know, "Hey, I have not received those." Instead of picking or finding those and finding your email address for each student here, it's easy just to do this right inside Canvas.

So, you can message them specific to what—or what option you're looking for. And then, once you do that, you do have the option to kill a couple people. You won't want to—you want to make it, um, out of here if you can say, "Okay, share," and I'm going to send it to her. You have the option to do that and really turn those people off or allow them to get the message. You can then give us up and then message those students. So, I really like the "Message Students Who" feature. Marcus, have you used this feature at all at Twin Lakes?

Yes! And I'm sitting here listening to it and thinking about how I have used it a couple of times. But I was actually thinking about a little bit of a flashback to the way things were before Canvas. I was having this terrible flashback of me scrolling through the gradebook, right? And doing this thing and like, "Oh, I got to find all the kids that scored all of the certain grades because I need to talk to them," right? Or I got to find all the empty boxes in the gradebook because, you know, whatever. And so, one of the things that we love about Canvas is just that, you know, the design of it, the intuitive nature of what's happening here. It makes our lives easier as educators, and therefore it makes things a whole lot easier for students, learners. And this is just another example of that with the "Message Students Who." I love that! I remember Kona Jones talking about that on the podcast, and I just thought it was such a great application. Again, if we're going to try to give feedback and personalize what we're doing, right, we want to make sure that we can do that. And that's a great way to accomplish that task.

Yeah, but we'll probably do questions at the end, right? You want to move on? And then we had a question here specifically about inbox: "Will choosing the course name inbox automatically include all students?" So, you are more familiar with it; you've used it that much in my instance, so yes. When you go to compose that message and then you basically—in that "To" section, you can choose from any—you can choose from any of the courses that you're a part of. And so, that means also multiples. So, you would go and select that course that you're going to send the message to, and it's pretty quick and painless there as well. Just 'cause it just popped up and caught my eye.

Rick wants to know if there's a limit to how long a media message can be. I don't—I don't know. I did a six-minute one this morning. I did six minutes this morning. Somebody pop in and let us know, but I mean, I did six minutes. And again, this is a media—this is the media recorder within an assignment or whatever. I was—I didn't use it for instruction purposes today, but I'm not familiar with any limit. I know that when I did six or seven minutes, which is sort of a good comfort zone in terms of chunking video content, I had no problems. It was click, click, click, and it was there. I'm sure as your videos go longer, you're going to have a little bit more processing time just because of that file, but maybe somebody who's smart can pop in and tell us that there's an exact amount. What do you think, Eddie?

I think we're going to jump into—I know that some comments here about my audio, which I'm trying. I don't know; it looks good on my end. And then, some people said, "Well, on Twitter, it looks well, different." I do have the AirPods in; that is true, onto input audio. So, if we're messing up, I'll go to the over-the-ear headphones, but let's continue. I know back—and it's uses feedback in his courses that he instructs on.

Yeah, Mark, go ahead and bring me up. All right, all right! Do we see a big ugly click here to complete? All right, so this is part of my module. I was doing state-mandated testing; this was the training module. But we've talked a lot about how we can personalize our feedback. And certainly, in this particular example, I wouldn't probably have used this because this was sort of a "you did it or you didn't" scenario. But I wanted to bring up something to show you how you can provide some video or audio feedback. Again, I don't remember who it was that brought it up on the podcast and said, "Oh, maybe it was Kona again; probably she's the princess of Canvas!" But she is! And I'm the Wookiee!

But we are live, we are live! So, speak later! When you go into SpeedGrader—so, I'm in an assignment within a course, right? So, of course, I would have had some better-looking assignments here if I was using my actual class. But in this case, if I bring up SpeedGrader on an assignment—so I'm in the assignment over here. You can see I'm under the assignments within a course, and I'm going to come over here to SpeedGrader, which is a whole other ball of wax in terms of being awesome. But I'm going to bring up SpeedGrader just to show—hopefully, there we go! So, I'm in SpeedGrader here, and you can see I've got, you know, 73 folks that are enrolled in this particular course.

And the only reason I want to bring this up is the media recorder here for feedback. Okay? So, we keep coming back. Eddie and I are like a broken record here for you this afternoon. But yes, SpeedGrader is great. You can pop in your scores quickly; you can see the content right there. Super great! You can add your comments, which I still do even when I provide some audio or video feedback. Again, we can give both of those; we can give the media as well as the text. I prefer to give them the video and then give them a sort of a list of bullet points for feedback because they can always refer back to either of those.

But in SpeedGrader, I can again click on the media recorder, and again, it brings up that same thing that we've seen now in announcements and assignments all over the place. And I can record a video talking to my students individually. In this case, this thing I'm recording would go directly to that student as part of their feedback. And you wanted to talk about being efficient. You want to talk about saving yourself valuable time as a teacher, right? This is where it's at because I can say what I need to say in less time, can be more to the point. Ryan, talk about authentic and valuable feedback, right? I could certainly do a bulleted list in the comments and say, "Oh, you know, your writing was this and this and this, and work on sentence structure and language conventions; our need work." And I really enjoyed your closing comments! I could do those; I can still do those, but it feels different when your teacher is speaking to you directly and talking to you. And so, I really love that ability for us to give some authentic feedback to our learners within SpeedGrader!

Right, we're as well, please do, because I—sorry, you don't have to show my marks. So, what I—and that's like the authentic feedback is a good piece, and what Marcus talked about is so valuable. The fact that it is baked in to do that, I’m telling all with other—we're not gonna name any names. It's really a piece that I think we really set apart, like the ability for me to get on base, but show my emotion instead of writing a long email to the student, right? Or are you doing comments on a Google Doc like this, right? The piece, right? And I know that I've had—because I do audio/video production, I have students that didn't—I don't want you to see my face there!

Next to that, maybe every corner is also an audio recorder. But if you're uncomfortable or, let’s say, you just got out of the shower yet, and your hair's a mess, that's the great place to really pop in. Okay, it’s just the recording! I'm telling you, the last few days—because we're in this weird situation—I’m doing more audio recording! I usually don't mind putting my face in the bottom left-hand corner of the video that I'm recording for that, but I use the built-in every time! And I definitely have been doing audio recording. I mean, if I had other—otherwise, just be as this is a different time. We never know when we're gonna have this face-to-face point, right? We're in this weird place, but we get that!

We should take it! So, if you have a chance, more people are having difficulty hearing me. If you get that chance, you would make that. You use the video piece, but there is an option to do it. It's incredible!

Yeah, yeah! And obviously, like, you know, Canvas—you guys brought a couple of ringers in here to talk about, you know, media, video, and audio because that's kind of what we're into. So, certainly, it's something that we're passionate about. But I know that in my corporation, we've made that a priority. So, in my corporation, we have Canvas for grades 6 through 12, and it is a necessity that teachers utilize some of these tools that we talked about today as part of their e-learning, whether it be sort of a conventional snow day or whether a sort of e-learning day, or in this case, certainly the, you know, sort of an extended experience. It's just so important because that's the concern, right? That's the thing that people are starting to think ahead and think about is, you know, what does our learning look like, you know, in mid-April or May when we’re doing this sort of thing?

And so, I really hope that all the folks watching today—and later today and throughout the next couple of weeks with these live webinars—I hope that everybody really considers all of these things and how impactful and authentic they are in really making the best of what is truthfully not an ideal situation for learning for a lot of us. Canvas makes it easy!

So, yeah, and we've had a few questions popping up about, like, not being able to find the features that we showed today. It very well may be possible a lot of these things have to be turned on by your Canvas admin. So, Brooke, please, if you're still having issues—Brooke says she can't find the "Message a Student Who" feature—please jump on and send an email to that admin. They may be having issues finding that message, and hopefully, it's a service that can be turned on for you. Again, we're not Canvas administrators at districts, so we're trying to go Brad. Great message here, right?

We are leveraging a lot of technology, you know, because a lot of us are forced into this, and Marcus and I got the opportunity to at least show you some things that we love on the communication side, for sure!

Anybody, you want to do a little teaser of conferences, like a real quick, like, "This is a thing that exists?" Do we have one coming up?

I don't know, Mark! I do! I think—I don't know what's on the schedule, so the boss man is here! If you want to jump into conferences, that's a really—sure, that can also be read. So, we've got, what, four more minutes? You're fine if you go over!

Okay! All right! What do you think, Eddie? You want to bring it up? You want me to mark it up? That's all right.

All right, because you—that's his nice way of calling me old! All right, let me—I am gonna back out here!

All right, so conferences! Conferences has been a hot topic! So, top it is! It truly is! And we talked about it on the podcast this week, and I spent a good chunk of time over the last few days talking to teachers about how they might use this. So, within a course, again, you're gonna go to conferences. Now, one thing you have to keep in mind with your students is that they may not be able to see conferences, so you want to go to the settings of your course and double-check on that.

So, I'm gonna go to settings, and I'm under—see, we've got these tabs up here, and I switched over to navigation. Luckily for me, in this course, my conferences are under the course navigation, are visible. But you can see down here there are items that you can hide from your students in the navigation. Okay? So, if conferences was down there, you would want to enable it. So, you can drag and drop or you can hit the three dots and enable or disable. But in order for the kids to see that, you'll want to double-check and make sure that they can see the conferences portion on the left-side navigation. So, that's the first thing.

Now, in conferences, like we've heard this—and you know, maybe everybody else knew this, and maybe I'm the one that was kind of new to it—but, you know, there's this talk of synchronous and asynchronous learning, right? So, this is a way for teachers to communicate with students or even families live, right, in real time. So, you know, you can basically send out a message, an email, and announcement within your course and say, "I plan to be available live at this time on this date. Be there if you can!" to your students or to your, you know, depending on maybe parents if you've got younger students.

And so then you create the conference, and you create it sort of in real-time ahead of that schedule. And so you name it, you can set your duration of time, you can enable recording of the conference, which is super important for those that can't be there live; there can be a recorded version. You can give a description, and then you invite all the members of the course, and so then you update that.

And I will go ahead and do that at some point. I'm gonna get infinity screens! So, now I've got under new conferences I've got this conference ready, right? And so there's a setting. I always check the gears just to be safe. And then you can go ahead and start that conference. And I won't do that right now, but when I start that conference, we're live, and I can—if I've told students ahead of time, "This is when we're meeting," they are gonna start populating!

I can mute them all at once! I can do all of the things that you would expect in any other webinar sort of platform that you're familiar with. But the million-dollar value here is it's baked right in! That's Eddie's term, right? Built right into Canvas! So, all the people—everybody on the interwebs is talking about this, "What about this one?" or "What about this?" or "Let's try this!" And you saw in the news that this teacher did this—whatever! Don't! Don't! Because it's right here! It's right here! There's no other accounts; we don't have to do anything! We don't have to make a video doing the step-by-step tutorial for kids on how to create the account in the other thing! You just have to do it, and it's right here, built in! And that's, again, so convenient, so powerful. And now we can have live interaction!

I just had this conversation with a teacher this morning, and she was like, "How would I—I could I use this?" And I said, "Honestly, you don't have to necessarily do like a live class. You know how about just try it out by getting kids to show up, see that there are other people in the conference, interact, and go from there!" Like, have one trial run, like, "Okay, we all figured that out. Okay, tomorrow I'm gonna teach a lesson!" You know, but it's super—just, yeah! I think it is really good!

We actually used it—when we were kind of in emergency mode, right? Let's get everybody together! Truly, if we can really figure out what was that one thing that we might—we wanted to do some live stuff. And unfortunately, I couldn't stand in front of my staff and talk about Loom or other tools to give that by function. So, what was really cool—well, conferences, anyways—is like this is a neat tool to use for teams or PLCs! If you want to do a staff meeting inside Canvas, again, we talked about the term "making it," but the reason—well, is a piston. And that's something that I've always strived for; it's just keeping meetings consistent for the learners in my face so that they don't have to go to something new.

There goes one of the AirPods! Maybe that's why we're having bodies! Slide down! Live! Down! Pod down! Still got you! But I think that's the one piece I was really excited for my first saw it a couple of weeks ago was like, "Don't! We don't need to teach!" It's inside Canvas! There are already there, so we can collaborate with the conference. It's a great thing for teams, a great thing for staffs to get together virtually, and then obviously try it with your students as well!

Well, I met Mark! Well, everybody make sure you tune in! We're gonna share a couple of times a day over the next little bit! If there are specific topics you want us to cover, let us know! Stick them in the comments! Big shout-out again to the Canvas Casters, Eddie and Marcus! Go follow them on Twitter, follow them on Instagram, follow them on Friendster, Napster! I am huge on MySpace still!

Thank you, everybody! We won't be talking to you again!