Reflect of chapter 5 of canvas design

  This chapter is the extra supplement of previous four chapters which tells how to use canvas on mobile device, create collaborations, set up outcomes and rubrics, integrate external apps into canvas and view course analytics and statistics.

  After the chapter reading and relative practice on my own AR course, I almost finished the practice of most canvas features and established a real AR course on canvas.

  At first, I couldn’t log in the canvas app in my phone because I chose a wrong url for access. Fortunately, I figured it out by Angela’s help and Sunny, Sam could also log in the app successfully.

  As you know, the canvas version referred in this book is the old one which suited for users in 2014, so most screenshots showed in chapter are not attached to the newest version which we are using now, particular for mobile device. In this case, the interface of mobile app changes a lot and some features released comparing to the old version.

  For example, the profile in bottom bar was replaced by calendar and removed to the left-top corner, and some features like people and attendance are available now. In addition, collaborations and outcomes are still blocked in app, but they can be opened in browsers as a new window.

  Teachers can view different modules of courses like announcements, calendar, to do list and inbox conversations in mobile app as computer, but it seems like they cannot do specific editing on relative parts and upload document files for assignments in app that it just supports images and video or audio import. The app in mobile device can be a convenient way for quickly course accessing and lightly content editing, teachers need turn to computer version if they want to use rich content editor or other specific operations.

  In the collaborations module of computer version, I have started a new collaborative work about the development of AR by Google Docs. The book introduced the EtherPad for another access to collaboration, but I didn’t find it in the drop-down menu of “collaborate using”. Through the collaborations feature, I can set a collaborative work for groups and arrange students between different groups easily. Students in group need finish the group work collaboratively by Google Docs, It’s really an effective way for teachers to track and credit students’ differentiated work.

  Outcomes module allows teachers to set different outcomes and rubrics for different assignments or courses. To clarify diverse categories of outcomes, teachers can also add different groups for different categories to avoid a mess. Canvas provides common core state standards for English and math teachers that they can import needed common outcomes directly from “find” function and adjust them to their courses based on differentiated purpose. I didn’t use this function because my course is about AR.

  I embedded the rubric I designed contains specific criteria for grading for group presentation to group assignment about the development of AR. The rubric will be displayed automatically in right area of the SpeedGrader interface and help me a lot on grading students’ assignments authentically. But the problem here is that I still cannot arrange grades weighting for different assignments that the final grade is still the average of all the assignment grades.

  I installed external apps of Khan Academy and YouTube to my course so that I can utilize them directly in the rich content editor and search for something interesting or useful for my course without open a new window for them. It’s really efficient for teachers to find and distribute resource to students.

  Because my AR course is just an experiment for practicing canvas features, I can’t get rich information about students’ activities, submissions and grades from course analytics. But it’s really an effective way for teachers to track students’ learning when they implement canvas for real teaching. And through course statistics, they can easily monitor the running statistics of the course they choose. Teachers can use these two functions to differentiate students’ learning in one course and refine their course by authentic statistics for promoting efficiency.