Month: April 2021

Tips for grading in CarmenCanvas

| Sarah Rusnak

Here are a few tips for making grading just a little bit easier inside CarmenCanvas.  Note, these tips are most helpful when you’ve already completed assignment and gradebook setup, preferably at the start of a course.

Mark a student as excused

There are two ways to mark an assignment as excused.

  1. If the assignment is graded Complete/Incomplete, select Excused from the drop down.
  2. If instead the assignment is graded for points, type EX in the points box and Canvas will automatically mark the assignment as excused.

Per Canvas, “Excused assignments are not calculated as part of a student’s total grade. When an assignment is excused, the assignment page and the student grade page will show the student that he or she has been excused from the assignment. Students cannot submit excused assignments.”

Group assignments

Group assignments can be wonderful for collaboration, and help cut down on time spent grading. Sometimes group projects don’t quite go as planned, but you can still change an already published group project to be graded individually.

Drop lowest grade

If you have put assignments or quizzes in groups, you can create a rule to drop the lowest grade within that group.

Set default grade

Did you leave your students’ assignments on the seatback of the seat in front of you on the airplane, and you need to give everyone full credit for the assignment? (Yes, I did that, and yes, it was years ago) You can set the default grade for all ungraded submissions for an assignment.

Review grades with a student

Would you like to go over a student’s grades with them while on a Zoom call, and pull just their grades up on the screen? Or do you have a student who needs help viewing their own grades?

Have another issue?

Here is every how-do-I article about grades that has been published by Canvas, and below is an 80 minute training from the Office of Distance Education and eLearning that covers the following:

  • How to use CarmenCanvas to grade various types of assignments and exams
  • The efficiencies of Speedgrader and Quiz settings for providing feedback on student work
  • Best practices for creating effective rubrics for assignments
  • Use of the Carmen Rubric tool
  • Managing the Gradebook effectively
  • Identifying additional resources on grading

Always show meeting control toolbar in Zoom

| Sarah Rusnak

If you’ve ever started sharing your screen in Zoom and then lost track of the controls for Zoom, there is a setting to fix that.  It’s called Always show meeting control toolbar and here’s how you find it. You can also skip down this page for a video demo.

Navigate to CarmenZoom in your browser and login with your name.#. By default, you’ll be on the Meetings tab:

Default tab once logged in to CarmenZoom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Move to the Settings tab

Settings tab and details on CarmenZoom

There are many settings here, I’d suggest you search (Ctrl + F or Cmd + F) for the words Always show meeting control toolbar, or you can scroll down until you find the setting.  When the setting is turned on, the toggle bar will appear red with the white dot on the right side.

Always show Zoom Controls toggled on

Now when you share screen in Zoom, the control toolbar will appear at the top center of your screen so you can always find it. Note, only you will be able to see the toolbar, unless you also turn on the setting to show Zoom controls during meetings.  But that’s a different topic!

Video – Always show Zoom controls