Hey guys, we are live for the last time this week, so pay attention. My good friend Sam—Sam's one of our Canvas trainers—put together, with the help of the training team, a really cool resource that we want you to be aware of. The training resources as a whole, but also a specific training about really preparing to launch with Canvas LMS.

So, I'm excited to have Sam here as a guest and as our host for the next thirty minutes. Sam, I'll hand it over to you to take things over. Have fun!

All right, awesome! Thank you so much. I am super excited to be showing you this Welcome course. This course is sort of a condensed version of things that we try to do with training, so the goal is not to have you walking away as perfectly ready-to-roll Canvas experts, but we want to get you off the ground quickly and give you some resources to help you just get your content where you need it to be and help you deliver that content to your students.

To get started, we're just going to share my screen here. So, Training Services Portal: the first place we're going to look is our training services portal. If you have not explored the training services portal, this will be an exciting tool for you. It's going to be in your Canvas instance. We're gonna come down here to—there we go—our Help button. So we're going to jump into the Help section in our course or in our instance, and there's going to be a link that says Training Services Portal. When you click on that, it's gonna go through an authentication piece for you. You'll click authorize, and it's gonna take you into the services portal.

If this is your first time in the portal, you're gonna want to kind of click through the tutorial. I'm clicking through it fast, but you can take a look at it when you've got that time. When I'm ready to go, I'm gonna say "Don't show me this again" and click complete.

While we have a lot of different training resources in the portal, what we're highlighting today and what we're talking about is right off the bat. What you're gonna see on your homepage—we call this our Canvas Quick Launch program, or Canvas Quick Launch course—and basically, we're helping you adapt and bring your course from what we're calling "on the ground" to delivering distance learning online.

So, we like to kind of talk about the differences: you're not necessarily teaching online or creating an online course; you're facilitating distance learning through an online platform. You don't have to think about things being perfect, especially if this is your first time doing it. It'll be a little bit different than those who might have already taught online courses, but the idea of this course is we really want to get you ready to roll.

So, if you were to click on the course—I'm already enrolled—but you would see a link here to enroll in the course. I have my tabs pulled up already, so that we're not waiting for things to load. When you click on the course and you go to start your course, it's gonna take you right into the Preparing to Launch home screen. This is once you've been enrolled, and we have a couple of different sections.

Our first section is very space-themed because that was all I could think about while we were talking about, like, “All right, how do we help people get off the ground? How do we do this?” I think it just naturally kind of fell into the space theme. So, we're gonna have your mission—that's gonna give you just an overview of what this course is going to do. We're going to go to Preparing to Launch. This is going to walk through; we'll take a look at this. We have an awesome course template that our Learning Services instructional designers created. It's something that you'd be able to get from our Canvas community; we've got links to it in the course, so you don't have to worry about that right now.

Basically, it's gonna give you kind of a starting point. It can be really hard to start with a complete blank canvas, especially if your school's not been doing any sort of design and has not had time to prep the materials. So, that's going to get you ready for launch.

Then we've got a section that we're calling "Plotting Your Course." This is going to walk you through building course content, helping you understand what we call the Rich Content Editor—which is what I call also your Canvas BFF. No matter where you go in Canvas, the Rich Content Editor is there for you. So, the sooner you learn that tool, the more confident you'll be in building pretty much anything in Canvas.

Beyond that, we're moving on to Mission Control. So, the first step is, "Sam, I gotta get my content up here," that's Plotting Your Course. The second step, Mission Control: how do you communicate with your students? How do you get information out to them? How do they respond and get information and ask you questions? We'll talk about course communication.

Lastly, we have this last section called "Encountering Intelligent Life." This is going to talk about the ways that you can give feedback, how you're going to be able to grade the assignment submissions that we're gonna take a look at up in course content. Then we wrap up with kind of "Blast Off." You're ready to go—or at least as ready as you're gonna be—and you've got some content ready, and you're publishing things and interacting with your learners as they are interacting with your students in the course.

So, we'll take a look at kind of each of these different pieces to see all the module template goodies that we have in here for you. Our first one is Preparing to Launch. You're going to begin your course. We're going to give you that module template that I mentioned, so you're able to go in, download the template, and then you'll kind of see throughout the course we have little GIFs that are going to walk you through the basic steps.

So, anything that's kind of complex or has a couple of different steps to it, we have really quick little snippets to walk you through the process. We also give you the written instructions down here as well. So again, this is just getting started, getting that template in. If you already happen to have a course template or have some things already built in Canvas, then you may not need this template, but we have it there for you to make sure that you're able to kind of get off the ground and running.

We really built the course and kind of framed the content that we're building around that template as well. So, Home Page in general, in the bridge courses and in the training services. We're going to click continue—that'll take you to the next piece.

So, we'll talk about that template, talk about why you use the template, and how you can set the template to have your home pages or modules. The home page, if you're not familiar and you're just getting started with Canvas, that's the landing screen. So, every time you or your students jump into your course, this is where they're taken. You can do a lot of different types of home pages—you'll see in this little GIF here—but we usually suggest either a front page or course modules.

The front page is nice; it gives you a landing page. If you look on here, there's a message area where you can put messages to your students. You can put your communication policies in there, which we have built into this homepage. The nice thing about the home page is that you can change it and update it to be whatever is most relevant to your students.

The second option—and what we're also suggesting—if you're really just using this as a material repository: I just need to get files and content up in there. Using modules can be helpful because the modules are sort of the building blocks; that's the framework of your course. That's how you're going to structure and guide your students through your content as you add it.

So, we talked about our homepage there, and then we talked again a little bit about this course template. We had mentioned modules. We have a little sample module here already built into the template, and what's great about the module is it has a little bit of an example. So, there's a module overview and to-do lists. You don’t have to necessarily keep this as a page, but the formatting of it can be really great.

For example, one of the suggestions we've been giving is having an announcement set out, and the announcement is what's driving the weekly activities. So, you can use the content from that template and that page to pull into your announcements and set up this little overview. We’ve got a little bit of a description of what these different pages are going to do for you, and we also have little knowledge checks because we want to make sure that you're following along and that you're getting what we're trying to dish out for you.

So, you might have these little quiz questions in between, and you're gonna answer them and move forward. So, that's the great thing with the training portal: we don't want to just give you the buttons that you need to push; we want to check your knowledge. We want to make sure that you're prepared and that you're getting these key points.

Also, if you go through and complete all of the different elements, you're going to get the ability to earn a badge for this as well. So, you've seen I'm part of a program. The Preparing for Launch is a program. We just did our first part of the Preparing to Launch program, so it's telling me what my next step is. I can go back to my program, and then notice here in the course area, it's saying that I finished my Preparing to Launch. I can jump into the next bill pieces. The Plotting Your Course area is where you're probably going to spend the most time because this is really kind of mission—or not quite mission control…

This is the part of your course. This is where you're pulling in your content. You're going to create assignments. This is where the learning happens. So, we give you a little overview of what you're going to cover, and then we really jump into building files. The big parts of building right now is, I'm sure you have files; maybe they're in Google Drive, maybe they're in your Office OneDrive, maybe they're all just saved on your computer. We have a section in your course called "Files," where you can very easily upload individual files, upload entire folders—if you happen to have folders that are already structured. If you're familiar with zipping files, you can zip the very top-level folder, pull it in here as an upload, and it will automatically build that entire folder structure for you. This becomes super important when it comes time to pull your content into the different pieces of the course, whether it be in modules, pages, or your assignments. So, files become kind of that back-end structure of where your content is going to be living.

Once you've used the Rich Content Editor, remember I talked about the Rich Content Editor? This is what we call, what I call, the Canvas BFF. The Rich Content Editor is this editing interface. Whenever you see that pencil and you click on it, it's going to take you into editing that item. It's got, if you're familiar with Word or Google Docs, very similar formatting pieces. I know the GIF is a little bit much to watch while I'm talking, but basically, we're going to walk you through all of the different pieces of the Rich Content Editor. We have great links. If your Rich Content Editor looks a little bit different than the one that's popping up in the GIF, we do have a new Rich Content Editor that's also in place. We'll send you two resources there, but we're going to help you learn how to edit pages where you're going to pull in content.

What's awesome about pages, as well, is if you're editing a page, there are abilities to see page history. So, if you make a mistake, or you need to update a page, or you need to add more content but you put something that you need to change, you can view the entire page history. If you think about your home page, you could have a dynamic changing home page that goes back and forth between different versions depending on what information you need there. And of course, we're linking you out to all of the awesome guides that we have in our community. So, here's everything you need to know about the Rich Content Editor. If we came up here, this is everything you need to know about the new Rich Content Editor. So, we're not just kind of giving you the guides; we want to help you figure out how you're going to leverage these tools.

So, pages are going to be sort of that place where you can display information. If I have a page in a course, that's where I'm going to have my assignment readings that I could put in. I can pull in documents. If you've got links, what I love about having the sort of internal linking system in the Canvas Rich Content Editor is that I don't have to just say, "Complete this assignment." I can put a link directly to the assignment within the course. I can link to content created, such as the pages or the assignments directly. I can link to the very first part of a module, so take them to a module of information. You also have the ability to upload those files, so remember earlier we were talking about pulling in files? This is where that comes into play. Your files can be nice and organized; you can upload them. This GIF is showing uploading images. So again, we're really kind of bringing in all of this content and pulling it all together.

External links—this is going to be, again, maybe you're sending your students to the NASA website or another site that has some free learning resources that you're having them watch or review. So, it's really a dynamic interface. You're able to get all of your content in here, and right now this is building in what we call a page. But the Rich Content Editor exists in discussions, it exists in assignments, it exists in quizzes. So, all of these features are something that you can leverage regardless of what type of content you're building. A major question when it comes to building content is that question of, "What should I be building? What's the best tool for this activity that I'm trying to accomplish?"

So, we have this section that's we're calling "Presentation, Practice, and Assessment," and this is going to walk you through all of the different pieces that you can use in Canvas to give information, to assess your students, and to give students the opportunity to practice. So, we'll walk you through files, walk you through what pages are. We're going to walk you through discussions and what kind of discussions can be used to leverage for different activities. We'll talk about assignments and the different types of assignments and how you can leverage those to get different activities. It could be a matter of you're going to have them upload a file to you, or maybe you've got students, especially younger students, working on activities. Maybe they had some packets that they took home with some worksheets that, when all of this is done and settled, they're going to bring back in to share with you. You can have what we call an "on-paper assignment." You don't have to have it turned in, but every time you build an assignment, it's going to put that little column in your gradebook.

Quizzes are awesome. Our quiz tool allows you to not only give graded or practice quizzes, but whenever the students take the quiz, you can actually give feedback for the individual answer. So, if you can't be there in the classroom to facilitate and kind of go over the review questions, you have the ability to add feedback. So, when your students are done taking that quiz, they can see what they missed and what they might need to check up on. And then we get to modules. Modules talk about all of this different content, and all of this content can be built. Then, modules are sort of that blueprint, that structure. This is how you're going to display the information. You'll notice on here this module in particular is set up for a week, so there are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday activities. If you wanted to, you could have a module for every day and just upload—there's a little plus button up here—and you can pull files directly into a module. You can see there's some pages here; these are links to external websites. So, you can really build your structure by week, by unit. At this point, I think a lot of us are working day by day, so you can just put the date in there and pull in everything that your students are going to need.

Creating modules is very simple. You're just going to click the plus button, name your module, and you are ready to roll. So, in addition to creating modules, here's an example. You can pull that content in; it could be content that already exists in your module, or you can build brand new content right on the fly. It'll create a shell for you, and then it's ready to go in that module for you. So again, we're kind of trying to give you the building blocks first. Just start out by getting some content in there. Decide what assignments do I need? What pages might I need? Do I want to use discussions or quizzes? And then it's how do I get it to my students? Modules are the way that you get it to your students. You'll notice as we're looking at some of these, there's a check mark—that's going to mean that that is published and being shared with your students. So, as you go through, it's important to remember to publish your content so that your students can see it.

We also want to share and direct you to the Commons. What's awesome about the Commons is that there's a ton of resources that are already created and available to you that other educators are sharing. You can also specifically filter, so maybe you're creating a really awesome page and you want to share that with all of your other teachers teaching that same subject. You can share your content to the Commons, and then all of your other instructors or other teachers in your district, in your school, in your department, are able to pull in that resource. So, you build it once and share it out. It's a great way to kind of come together and divide and conquer what can be super overwhelming when it comes to trying to get all of your content up here. This is also a great way to share templates and share resource documents as well.

So, the last piece we're talking about kind of assessing students, we're walking you through the different sections and the different pieces. This talks about that visibility and publication. So, there are sort of two important places to remember to publish. You want to make sure that in your modules you're publishing your items, but you also want to make sure that you publish your course. When you are on your home page of the course, in the top corner here—if I jump into a course really quick—notice this is not published. So, when you're ready to roll, click "Publish" to make sure that your students can get to that course content.

We talked a little bit, and we had a question from Eddie Smith wondering if you have any best practices for districts to start with modules and pages. What do you do? For districts, I would say it kind of depends on where your content lives. If you have a lot of files and everything that you're uploading, then I think the best way to start is just kind of breaking it down and having a module that might have a page that says "Reading Resources" or a page that's for "Homework." So, I think kind of starting out with the modules, because the modules again are going to be the delivery method for your students, and you can build all of your content underneath it.

We want to kind of walk you through—once you start building your course—how do you get to your course and share your course with your students? What are the different ways to navigate and look at student submissions? What are some things that you can do as far as grading and providing feedback? You will also notice within your course, you have a grades section, and this is kind of where you can go through and see that assignment that I was mentioning. So, when you create assignments, you'll notice that you can have students turn things in, and we can also do what we call "submissions" and "grading."

This is just a quick walkthrough of what you'll notice as you start looking at student submissions. So, if we take a look here, you can see, as students turn in their assignments, you can click into them to see individual feedback that they had. This is where you can provide them with grading. So, that grading piece and your ability to have discussions, your ability to give feedback is really powerful when it comes to being able to help your students and support them.

The last piece, I will go back to the modules, and we're going to talk a little bit about the "to-do" list that you have. When you build your modules, what’s really great about it is that when you publish it, your students get their "to-do" list. So, they have a very clear idea of what is upcoming for them and what's due. If you've got students who might be struggling with motivation, having that "to-do" list is really helpful for keeping them accountable. They can also track what's been graded, so they know what is coming in.

So, if you have questions about any of this content or anything else, please feel free to reach out to us. I know we kind of covered a lot, but it’s a good overview of the different pieces. We look forward to helping you out as you build your content.