Innovation

Creating alternative/ accessible content in your course with one click

| Margaret Murphy

*Content Accessibility

Anyone else sometimes leave the captions on when watching TV, even though they can hear the audio just fine?

TV with captions

What you are doing is taking advantage of material that was made “accessible” in a variety of modes  – auditory and text. Accessible content is content means that a space is always, 100% of the time, welcoming to people in as many modes as possible. Accessibility means that “accommodations” are integrated into a space and are not particularized to an individual. (An “accommodation” on the other hand, is a modification made to a specific aspect of a system—for example a document or facility—that has been adapted to meet the needs of a specific individual or group. An accommodation in higher ed, is often initiated by a formal request from a disabilities service office.)

Ever need to convert a Power Point into a PDF? What about wanting to make your Power Point slides readable on a Kindle or other ereader? Tools like Blackboard Ally and BeeLine make this easy.

 

Blackboard Ally

https://ally.ac/covid19/

With a simple drag and drop, you can use BlackBoard Ally’s “File Transformer” tool to upload a course file and download it in an alternative format. You do not need to be using BlackBoard LMS to use this tool. This way, you can personalize your learning experience to better fit your needs, devices, and learning preferences. This tool is free and will covert your files in a matter of seconds.

After uploading your file, pick an alternative format that best suits your current task or situation. You can pick and mix formats too.

Learn more here:

 

 

BeeLine

https://www.beelinereader.com/

Do your eyes tire after looking at text on a screen all day? Chances are your students’ do too. Another free tool out there is BeeLine reader which is a digital reading technology that uses color to accelerate reading speed and literacy acquisition.

You can actually test out this tool for free here but trying it out on their demo text.

BeeLIne Demo text

 

 

* both of the items mentioned here are being offered for free in response to widespread school shutdowns due to COVID-19. Prices subject to change.

Student (group and individual) Presentation tools

| Margaret Murphy

web conference

Ways to hold virtual presentations

In the last few days I have gotten a lot of questions about strategies and tools for virtual student presentations (both group and individual). Here are some ways you can make this happen.

Question #1 -Can I host a synchronous meeting with students and then allow them (individuals OR groups) to speak?

Yes! Students can share their screens once you promote them to the proper “role” that give them those rights. There are multiple roles available for a meeting: host, co-host, alternative hosts, and participants. The role that you have in a meeting is designated by the host. (Detailed document on features available to each role.)
  • Host: This is you since you are the user who scheduled the meeting. They have full permissions to manage the meeting. There can only be one host of a meeting.
  • Co-hosts: This is what you want to promote your participants to when it’s their turn to present. Shares most of the controls that hosts have, allowing the co-host to manage the administrative side of the meeting, such as managing attendees. The host must assign a co-host during the meeting (maximum of 50 co-hosts per meeting). Co-hosts cannot start a meeting. If a host needs someone else to start the meeting, they can assign an alternative host.
  • Alternative hosts:  This is good for TAs or co-instructors. Shares the same controls as co-hosts, but can also start the meeting. Hosts can assign alternative hosts when they schedule a meeting.

zoom multiple speakers

Using co-host in a meeting

(detailed document here https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/206330935-Enabling-and-Adding-a-Co-Host)

There are two ways that you can make a user a co-host. You can assign up to 50 co-hosts in a meeting.

  • In the meeting, the host hovers over the user’s video, clicks on the three dots and chooses Make Co-Host.
    Co-host Zoom
  • Alternatively, the host can make another participant a co-host through the Participants window.
    1. Click on Manage Participants in the meeting controls at the bottom of the Zoom window.
      manage-participants-button
    2. Hover over the name of the participant who is going to be a co-host, and choose More.
    3. Click Make Co-Host.

make-co-host-option-from-participants-list

Once a participant has been made a Co-host, they’ll have access to the co-host controls.

Question #2 – Can students start their own meetings?

large zoom meetingYes. OSU’s instance of Zoom is branded as CarmenZoom and this tool is available to all faculty, students and instructional staff. Our Zoom Pro account permits up to 300 participants in one meeting.

(PS. I do NOT suggest hosting a Zoom meeting with 300 people. Just saying :). )

 

 

Question #3 – What assignments would student recordings be helpful for and how can students share recordings?

As stated in my Canvas Commons post, I will be sharing resources you can easily copy into your course. I just added an item called “Sample Video Assignment: Week X [Topic]” – go grab it!

Here’s a great use case: you have a group projects that requires 10 students to work together to create one video but the students are collaborating at a distance. You can either create a meeting room, invite students, make the presenters co-hosts while recording the meeting (as outlined in Question #1) or have one person in the group create a meeting, invite others, and record the meeting. When the students have finished meeting, they can share the recorded meeting with you (or peers) as a URL.

Because I love you I have a detailed documents that you can download and add to your course.

The links are public so you can just go ahead and share them with your students or put directly into your course

  1. Student instructions for class presentations (PDF) https://osu.box.com/v/instructionsforpresentations
  2. Student instructions for class presentations (Word) –https://osu.box.com/v/studentpresentationoptions

How about a Zoom Cheat Sheet??

Happy Canvas-ing!!!!!

 

via GIPHY

Welcome to the CPH Teaching and Learning site

| Margaret Murphy
Cunz Art
Cunz Art

Recently we have been blowing your email up with the basics of Canvas course design. Now that you have started to build and are getting comfortable with using Canvas, you have been asking for ideas on how to innovate and inspiration for increasing engagement in your course. We will use this site to post these suggestions and ideas.

 

The beauty of a site is that:

  1. Posts will be archived, tagged and organized (we are still coming up with our system but for now, everything will, at least, be archived and available for retrieval).
  2. You choose to get new posts and updates. Instead of us sending you a million emails a day, you can opt in to subscribe OR just bookmark this site and come back to it when you want. (And you will want to, because it will be awesome!)
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