Hey everybody! We are live. I'm here with my friend Tammy Neal from Florida. Let me tell you a couple of cool things about Tammy. Besides being one of our very favorite Canvas users, she also runs the eSports program at her school in Florida, which is one of the first in the state.

Tammy, welcome! How are you?

I'm doing well today! Getting ready to start spring break in just a little bit. Happy to be here!

The only thing that is holding Tammy back from spring break is this, so we're so grateful that she’d spend a few minutes to chat with us about what she does from a Canvas standpoint, and specifically how to make sure everybody can set up assignments very easily. We are here to take questions, so make sure that you ask them in the different comment rooms on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or wherever it is that you're watching. Maybe in the community?

Anyways, Tammy, I'm turning it over to you. Good luck! Be easy on everybody!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Okay, so ladies and gentlemen, today we are going to talk about adding assignments to our course. As you can see here, this is my dashboard. I have removed all of the classes that are my live student classes; we're not going to be sharing any student data today whatsoever. I've asked a few colleagues to jump in as students, and they've enjoyed the opportunity to play "student for the day."

So we're going to jump right in. There are a couple of places right from here that you can go to see assignments. I'm going to click over here because, again, I don't want to share student data. If we were to click on the calendar icon right here, we would see our Canvas calendar, and in "New Assignment," we would be able to see all of the assignments, all of the events, and everything that Chris taught us how to do that on Monday.

So one way you can get a new assignment is right here. We can just click on a day, and up pops a new event. So we're going to go to a new assignment, and sorry, teachers are leaving for a moment and wanted to jump by and say hello. So we have a new assignment right here, and we can go ahead and start typing in an assignment title. I'm just going to call this "Assignment Number Four" because I have some already loaded. We can change the due date of our assignment; I'm gonna leave it on June 8th for right now. We can change the course name, and I do not see—well, that's because I do not have my calendar open. Hold on, Jess, I have you turn on my practice course calendar. Notice that right here, I turned the calendar on so that I can do that.

Jumping right back here to "Assignment," I should be able to—now there’s my practice course. So if your calendar is not on, you cannot add something to the practice course. Assignment Four—then leave my due date right there for right now. It's in my group assignments; I'm not going to publish it right now. I want to go into more options. This is where we get to the bulk of what an assignment is about.

So at the top, you'll notice that we have the title that we just entered. You'll also notice up here too that it tells us very quickly that it is not published. As long as it's not published, we can make any edits. Students can't see it; they can't get to it. It's safe for us to do whatever it is we need to do.

So we have some rich text editing features right here—bold, italics, text color, centering—all those things that you would normally see in your word processing program, Word or Google Docs or whatever. So we can create the assignment. The details of the assignment go right here. You can add anything you need to do; you can add images; you can embed links. So if I wanted this assignment to link to a file that I already had, I could come in and write there, linking to that assignment so the students would be able to—when they see this—notice it has turned into a link. It would take them right to whatever file that I had. If I had images or links to other pages or other assignments or anything else that I might have in Canvas, I can link to it right there.

If I had a module, I could link to it. Highlight the word, click the module, and it's going to take me right to that module when the students come in.

Oh, not touching hands, not touching faces today!

When the students come in to see this assignment, points—you have plenty of space. You can put as much as you need to do there, and towards the end, I'll show you some advanced features. For those of you who, like me, enjoy the HTML stuff, I’ll show you some advanced features at the very end.

Come right here, and now we have a place to put our points. So whatever your point value for your assignment, you get full range of that. The assignment group—if you want to have a specific group. So in my district, projects and assessments have a different weight than regular assignments, so the students can know in advance if this is a weighted assignment or if it's a typical regular assignment.

How do you want to display grades? One of the great things I really like about Canvas is it remembers your choice from the last time you entered an assignment. So if you are consistently using percentages, you don't have to go in every time and change that; it remembers what you've done in the past.

We also have an option not to count this assignment towards a final grade. This is really important, especially right now as we are all learning how to go online. There are a lot of things that we just need to make sure the kids are seeing, and we want them to know that this isn't going to count towards a grade. So that's one way right there—that little checkbox—that tells Canvas, "This is an assignment I want them to do, but it's not going to be a graded assignment." You could still go in to the SpeedGrader that Megan did earlier today and grade it and give feedback, but it still would not count towards the final grade.

Okay, I'm gonna slow down just a little bit. As we're talking about submission type, submission type is really important that you understand how this section works. So I have this assignment set as text entry; that will give the students a text box to type into. They won't have to attach any other files; they can just give their feedback right there. But when you do a text entry, like Meghan showed us earlier today, you won't be able to use the SpeedGrader markup tools on that, so just be aware of that.

But we have some other options: No Submission at all—you don't need the kids to turn anything in. You have a video you want them to watch, something you just want them to be aware of. You can actually tell it to not accept any submissions. Notice you also have an "On Paper" function, so if you are still in a classroom and able to turn something in with paper, or you have those students who are having to do this online remotely with paper, you can set this assignment to be a paper assignment. Canvas will not give students an opportunity to submit it if it's a paper assignment, so they will give you an opportunity and change this just a little bit in your grade book.

And so far, I agree! Canvas LMS is wonderful. It is absolutely amazing! But on the online options, we have a text entry, a website URL—so I like to use a program called Trinket when I do my coding, and it's an all-online program. So the students get a link to their code, and they can just turn in their link to their code, and it's amazing.

Media recording—so if you want your students to actually record feedback to you, you can ask for that inside of Canvas, which is awesome. File uploads—so if you want File Uploads, they can upload a Word document or a Google Doc. You don't actually have to use the external tools for Google Docs; you can actually ask them to go in and upload that Google Doc, and if their Google Doc is associated with their Canvas account, it will see their Google Drive, and they can pull this on in that way.

And then you can have those markup tools because it pulls it in as a Word document. It basically takes a snapshot of that Google Doc. The students won't—you won't get the interactivity of a typical Google Doc, but you will still get that markup option that we talked about earlier today.

You can also restrict the file types. So if you only wanted your students to turn in a JPEG image for some reason, you can come right in here and put in ".jpg," and then that would be all that those students would be able to turn in—only ".jpg."

And I entered, so it automatically created that assignment on my calendar. So I'm going to go right back into it, go right back to "More Options," and there we go! Right back to where we were. It's still not published because we have not finished or published this assignment yet, but notice that the ".jpg" file is still there.

So one of the other things I really like about this is the students need options on how to turn something in. All of these can be made available at the same time for a student. So whatever you click here, all of those options are available to students.

Okay, so I am just going to—for right now—allow file uploads. I'm not going to restrict it. You can group assignments, make a group assignment if you have groups set up in Canvas, and I'm sure that we'll have some support on that. I know there is support in the Canvas community because that's how I learned to do this.

You can create—and notice here it assigns grades to each student individually. You can set it up to do that. You can set your groups in Canvas, or you can set Canvas to randomly choose your groups, so that is an option for you.

Another thing that I love is—yes, Chris, I love that there’s so much that students can submit! It is amazing! So many ways. I like the peer reviews. Sometimes when I'm teaching coding, the students turn in their programs, and I want their classmates to look at their programs. So I come in here and automatically assign peer reviews. I can make it to where it's anonymous: how many reviews does each user get to do, what's the due date on those reviews? So once the work is turned in, then Canvas can automatically assign a student to a peer review anonymously based on the fact that they've already turned it in. I love that there’s some—you can also come in here and manually assign peer reviews, in which you get to pick and choose who reviews the students' work and so forth and so on.

So I really do love these peer reviews. It really teaches my students how to help debug their programs, debug each other's programs, and give that positive feedback to one another. So they really come back, "Who said what about my program? Who is this?" It's not important; what's important is to read what they had to say.

So this allows me to have an assignment and a teachable moment all at the same time.

So assigning assignments—now, who to assign their assignment to. Typically, we assign an assignment to everyone in the class, but we don't have to. I've had some—these are some of my co-workers who volunteered to be students. So if I needed to come in here and make an assignment just for Mr. Hutchinson, I can come in and make an assignment just for Mr. Hutchinson.

So if you have a student who's in a situation where maybe they are self-quarantining, or they are having to work in a different environment, and you want to create something specifically for them, then you can come in and assign something, and Canvas will keep track of that for you. They will not see that their work is different than someone else's unless they look at someone else's screen.

So I can assign it to my practice course. So right now, I am just going to assign everyone in my course. I'm going to set a due date. This is the due date that we set on the calendar when we first started, so if we needed to change that, we could come in and change that.

I know that some schools are being very specific about when they drop assignments, so pay attention to what your school and your district requires for that. But you do not have to set that at all. 11:59 p.m. is the default, and you can choose whether to stick with that or change it. So changing it is really simple.

The first box is the hour, so if I wanted it to be 4 p.m., I would set 4 p.m., and it uses the time zone that it was sent in. When the students see it, if they're logging in from another time zone, it sees it based on the time zone that they log in with, so that's really cool as well.

Also, preplanning is available! This is really a nice function. It allows me to pre-plan and lets students see in advance that things are already pre-planned, but because it's not available to them yet, they can't do any of the work. They can't turn it in early; they can't see the text from the assignment. It allows me to show in advance, "Listen, guys, you're going to be out Thursday. You see that we have assignments due that we're going to be doing on Thursday?"

So this allows some of that pre-planning for students in their lives as well, so this is a really nice feature for those of us who want to get some things done in advance. You know, we've got some planning to do! So if I wanted this due June 8th, I did not want the students to see it until... I want them to see it on Wednesday beforehand. I can also set the time that they see it, so if I don't want them to see it until after class, I can put 4 p.m. and mark done.

I can also set how long they get to work on it. So this is not just a due date, but this is beyond the due date: how long do you want it to be visible and open to them? So right now, we've been asked not to set any due dates and let the kids work, because, you know, everybody's going through a lot right now. So we want to know I'm not going to mark that for me.

However, during the typical school year, there might be some situations in which you don't want to leave an assignment open for a long period of time. If you've got a quiz or something, a project that's due, you want a definitive last time to see this. You can certainly set dates.

Let's say you also have some students that you need to differentiate for. When we are dealing with IEPs, many times a student has extended time. So you can hear, under "Add Assign," if I'm not saying any of these people have IEPs, but we're going to take Mr. Hutchinson again, and if we need to give him a different due date, we can give him a specific due date just for himself.

It is not going to be due until the 9th, and we can set his availability as well. I'm going to give it to him on the 3rd like everybody else gets it, but we want to make sure that we know how much time we've given him. So his is due on the 9th, but I'm going to give him another week to make sure.

So that he knows that this is the amount of time that he has for this assignment.

Publish! So if I have gone in and made an assignment already, I have the option to notify users that the content has changed. So if I've created an assignment and opened an assignment, I can come back in and say, "Hey guys, I changed something here; you might need to go back and look at this."

But other than that, we're just going to click. If we click "Save," then it's not going to go live. If we click "Save and Publish," then we get that beautiful, lovely green checkmark.

So I'm going to click "Save and Publish," and when I look at the assignment now, we see that on my calendar, I have "Assignment Four," but I see also that it's assigned to one student. I can go into the details and see what I need to see for that one student.

So I'm gonna come back in here and edit my original assignment. I want to go back to the HTML editor for just a minute because I want you to see here now that it is published. Up here at the top, we have this beautiful green checkmark, and I promised you a chance to see what the HTML editor looks like.

So I'm going to slide down here. Oh, it already is open for edit! I'm going to click the three dots. I could delete it right there if I want to. I'm going to come in here to the HTML editor, and if you know HTML code, you can come in. I know a little bit since I teach web design, and this is really not about teaching code, but for those of you that are coders, you can come back to the HTML rich content, and you will notice that it is coded.

Now, in the Canvas community, there is a list of HTML tags that are acceptable—most HTML tags of your basic ones that work. So this is a feature that, for those of us that like coding, we can make this even more our own.

So I'm wondering if we have any questions, because if not, that's pretty much it on creating an assignment. The one thing, if you do make changes, make sure you go back down to the bottom and click "Save."

So you know that’s creating an assignment, and there we go!

Awesome! Thank you, thank you, Tammy! Great people from the community that have been answering questions are jumping in. Tammy, thanks for everything. We'll be talking soon! My pleasure!