A Canvas Tutorial, or, How Not To Enforce the Digital Divide

Scott Garbacz — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 02:28:11 +0000

Author:

Scott Garbacz

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In my E314 course, I need to teach a wide array of skills, ranging from academic research to close reading, from composition to the Oxford English Dictionary. Balancing these priorities against each other, and all of the skills against the need to provide students with a basic background for some demanding books, makes for an interesting challenge. Yet after a few semesters of teaching similar courses, which provided me with plenty of opportunities for fine-tuning my organization, I was surprised to hear one student make a rather basic observation to another:

“You’ve got to click, like, a lot if you want to see the comments on your paper.”

It was a bit of a revelatory moment for me. As someone who’s been using various forms of commenting software for the last decade or so, I never thought that the Canvas course management system posed any difficulties for students. I’d even prized myself on making a rather extensive and well-organized private course site, with various assignments, explanations of grading rubrics, links to important resources, and helpful hints tied together and always just a click or two away. But when I looked at what students actually had to do to see my comments, forcing myself to forget the basic assumptions I’ve internalized over the years, I realized—yeah. Maybe Canvas could be more easy to operate.

Or, more to the point, maybe I should be more proactive in providing my students with the tutorials and information they need to succeed in my class, rather than making it an impromptu computer-science flunk out class.

Below, I’m posting a series of images (along with comments, in a purposefully informal style that matches my classroom ethos) that walk through the process of accessing marginal comments in Canvas from a student’s perspective. I’d love these images to be shared; the more students are familiar with how to view their annotations, the better, and I’d like to think my effort provides benefit for more than just my students. In short, please adopt and adapt this tutorial at will.

But I also hope that the tutorial replicated below can give us a chance to think about the role of technology—and digital literacy—within classes that don’t have any particular digital focus. It’s tempting to blame students for failing to meet our arbitrary standards for technical proficiency. Yet leaving students without crucial instructions (even for tasks I find to be second-nature, and that seem to draw on a rather basic level of digital know-how) seems a betrayal of my role as an educator. Indeed, considering our growing awareness of the ways that the “digital divide” involves not just sheer access to web-based resources, but also an array of soft skills that may be disproportionally distributed among our students, it is crucial that we maintain awareness of our technology’s ability to throw unnecessary hurdles in the way of otherwise promising students. If we don’t consider the usability of our classroom technologies, we really are just policing the already problematic digital divide.

Looking at the Comments on Your Paper

I am a fan of Canvas. Unfortunately, sometimes their userface can be a bit ... disorientating. Here, therefore, is your Official Guide to Seeing the Comments I Gave To Your Paper(TM)!

Step 1: when your paper is graded, the course homepage should look something like this. Click on the link in the green circle (I expect you already knew this.)

Step 2: Click on the "View Feedback" tab circled in GREEN. Not the friendly-looking link to your paper that seems so inviting and linkish. (Yeah, Canvas's UI could probably be better here.) Note that it is circled in red. Do not click it. It will not help you.

You will also see overall comments on the right of your screen.

Step 3: Here things get a bit tricky. Some parts of your paper will be highlighted. There will be dotted lines going off into the right margin (circled in yellow). You also might see some comments at the end of your paper, and you will still see the general feedback on the right (both circled in blue). However, here you need to click on the minus sign (circled in green) a couple of times to get my many specific comments on your paper!

Step 4: Now you can see all of my comments (especially the ones circled in blue)! Congratulations! This will really help you in revisions.

Video Feedback for Advanced Students

Kate Stevenson — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 19:56:27 +0000

Author:

Katharine Stevenson

Image Credit:

Wikipedia, uploaded by Afrank99

I knew as soon as my students turned in their first papers this semester that I would need to come up with a new style of feedback for them. The juniors and seniors in RHE 309: The Rhetoric of Tourism write very differently from the freshmen and sophomores I worked with in RHE 306. I've spent very little of this Fall semester working on MLA format, grammar, and organization, and lots of time being impressed with how insightful, critical, and articulate these older college students are about the complex issues that come up in discussions about travel and tourism. Line editing and basic revision techniques were out in this class from day one.

After my students turned in their first drafts, we met for individual "paper conferences." When asked what they liked and didn't like about the course so far, almost every student said something along the lines of, "I like how small the class is. I like how we really get to talk." In many cases, this class--at twenty-one students--was the smallest they had ever been in at UT. It was obvious that they valued and enjoyed the intimacy of the course. I decided that they needed feedback that extended the atmosphere of the classroom to the work they completed outside it.

When I first saw my digital classroom this semester, I was sure that the computers would reduce this kind of personal attention and make it harder for me to get to know my students and for them to get to know each other. But there are so many ways to turn the digital classroom to our advantage, and video feedback is now one of my favorites.

I switched to Canvas as soon as UT started offering it a few semesters ago, but this was the first semester that I asked my students to turn in all of their work digitally and began using the "Speed Grader" system online. Canvas has a "Media Comment" option build into this Speed Grader, in the form of a little webcam button in the bottom right corner:

videocomment1.png

A pop-up appears, and after checking the "allow" button, you're recording an audio and video comment on your student's paper, which Canvas then saves for them to view later:

videocomment2.png

At first, I was wary of making a video recording of myself talking about my students' work. What if they didn't even watch the videos? Worse, what if they did watch them and decided that they were hilarious? But I decided to give it a try and see what happened.

My students loved it, and so did I. Instead of a sentence or two of praise for their writing and a couple of questions for them to consider in the future, I actually discussed all of what my students had written, in much greater depth than I would have in the little text comment box that I usually used. Instead of making some general statements about a whole paper, I also brought up specific sentences and phrases that I liked or had questions about. The feedback was both more specific and more holistic than when it was put into writing. My students felt like their papers were part of ongoing discussions inside and outside of the classroom, and they liked being able to tell that I had "really read" their work.

This is a fantastic tool for more advanced writing students, one that's worth getting over the embarrassment inherent in recording yourself speaking!

Blogging Pedagogy - Canvas

A Canvas Tutorial, or, How Not To Enforce the Digital Divide

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Image Credit:

Video Feedback for Advanced Students

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Image Credit:

videocomment1.png

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