eLearning Blog

Month: March 2021

Immersive Reader: Support tools for learners in Canvas

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Microsoft Immersive Reader interfaace

Canvas recently added support for Microsoft’s Immersive Reader tool-set within content pages. It provides features similar to other literacy software like Read & Write from Texthelp (also available to all MTU students, staff, and faculty). When viewing a Canvas content page learners can click the Immersive Reader button in the upper right corner of the page to access the tools.

Immersive Reader button in Canvas content page

Text to Speech

Immersive Reader features a read out loud feature that allows learners to listen to the text read back to them while the words on the screen are highlighted. Options to select a female or male voice and adjust reading speed are available. Text to speech assistive technology supports improved reading comprehension. When combined with the text translation feature learners can also listen to page content read to them in a different language.

Customized text display

Learners have access to many tools in Immersive Reader to customize the display of text on the Canvas content page, including:

  • Text size
  • Text spacing
  • Display font
  • Color theme
  • Text formatting

These text features support learners with dyslexia or other conditions that make reading comprehension more difficult. For example, increasing the text spacing can reduce visual crowding on a content page which can help increase reading speed with fewer reading errors. Increasing the text size also reduces line length which can also help improve reading speed. Adjusting the color theme of the page can help some readers who experience visual discomfort or symptoms of eye fatigue while reading the default text display on a page. There is a choice of display fonts including a standard sans serif option (Calibri) or a screen-optimized serif font called Sitka that can improve legibility and readability. A final font choice, Comic Sans, is targeted at early readers who are still developing their skills with letter recognition. The informal character of the font mimics the handwritten text that young learners practice often during primary school.

Grammar Options

Grammar Options panel in Immersive Reader

The grammar tools in Immersive Reader allow learners to see a visual indicator of the syllabic components of words and identify the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) via color coding and/or labels. These features support reading comprehension in both child and adult readers as well as non-native English learners.

Sample text in Immersive Reader showing syllable indicators and parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs).

Reading Preferences

The line focus tool in Immersive reader can help learners with attention deficit disabilities by focusing on one, three or five line segments of text. They can manually scroll through the page content or listen via the text to speech feature while viewing in line focus mode. Finally, a picture dictionary option is available for some words. When learners click on supported words a representative image is displayed next to the selected word.

Improved access

Tools like Immersive Reader support the Universal Design for Learning framework which encourages multiple ways for learners to engage with instruction materials (multiple means of representation). Students may also feel more empowered to engage with their instructional materials through additional modalities that can support comprehension and build confidence.

Resources

Need Help?

Contact the elearning support team in the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning if you have questions about Canvas, Huskycast, Zoom or other educational technology tools.

elearning@mtu.edu | 487-3000

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iClicker Cloud Polling Question Types

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Over the course of the past year, many instructors have incorporated iClicker Cloud into their online or remote learning environments as a way to engage students in the course content. Students are able to respond to questions via their mobile device, tablet or laptop using the mobile/website application known as iClicker Student App

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The ability for students to answer questions via a mobile device, tablet or laptop, opens up the opportunity for instructors to ask varied question types during the polling session. An instructor is no longer limited to just asking multiple choice type questions! iClicker Cloud offers the options of multiple answer, short answer, numeric and target type questions.

iClicker question types

Question Types

  • Multiple Answer – A multiple answer question type engages the student in evaluating each response for correctness or incorrectness instead of simply finding the single ‘best’ answer in a multiple choice type question. Multiple Answer questions allow for a maximum span of six responses (A-F) to choice from. The Results Chart will show number of responses that are correct, partially correct and incorrect.
  • Short Answer – A short answer question type allows the instructor to ask an open-ended question. Students have the ability to enter up to a 140 character response. The Results Chart will group identical answers together. The instructor has the option to ‘star’ the best response. If the responses are one or two word phrases, the instructor also has the option to display this as a Word Cloud.
  • Numeric – The numeric question type allows students to respond with up to an eight digit (plus decimal point) answer. Just like the short answer, identical answers will be grouped together in the Results chart and the instructor can ‘star’ the best answer.
  • Target – A target question type allows the instructor to provide an image to the student. The student would touch or click (based on device capability) on the appropriate portion of the image to answer the question. Students using any type of iClicker remote will not be able to respond to this question type.

Anonymous Polling

iClicker Cloud also allows an instructor to ask any of the question types listed above in Anonymous mode. To switch to anonymous mode, select the menu icon and turn Anonymous to ‘on’. The toolbar background will turn black to indicate Anonymous mode. *Performance points can NOT be given during Anonymous mode.

Anonymous mode in iClicker Cloud

Additional support for iClicker Cloud

If you have further questions or would like additional support in using iClicker Cloud, feel free to reach out to the elearning team at elearning@mtu.edu or contact the CTL at 487-3000.

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Regrade Option for a quiz question

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Have you ever written and published a quiz only to find out later that you had an incorrect answer marked on a multiple choice question or your students have pointed out that the True/False question should have been True not False!

Now that all (or most of) the students have taken the quiz how do you go back and update the quiz question to reflect the correct answer??

Canvas offers a Regrade Option for Multiple Choice, True/False and Multiple Answer type questions. The Regrade Option will become available when you change the question to reflect the correct answer. Canvas will present you with a Regrade Option box that offers four regrade options based on your situation.

Canvas Regrade Option
  1. Award points for both corrected and previously correct answers – This option should be used for Multiple Choice questions where you determine that the question was written with more than one answer that would be accepted as correct. Please note: this option is not available for a Multiple Answer type question.
  2. Only award points for the correct answer -use this option when you have marked an incorrect answer as the correct answer and would like points to reflect the correct answer.
  3. Give everyone full credit for this question – In some instances, the answer options on a question may have written in such a way that it created confusion or misinterpretation for the student and you prefer to give everyone credit towards the question.
  4. Update question without regrading – This option will allow you to update your question to the correct answer but will not change the points earned by students who have already taken the quiz.

Regrade Option not available for the following quiz question changes

If you are making any of the changes listed below, it is recommended that you moderate the quiz and allow students who have taken the quiz an additional attempt in order to see the updated version of the quiz.

  • The Regrade Option is not available when you are adding or removing a question from a quiz.
  • Adding or deleting answers from a question will disable the Regrade option from being available.
  • Changing the points value of a question does not enable the Regrade Option.

One last note….the Regrade Option does not apply to questions linked to question banks!

Reach out to us!

If you would like to learn more about Canvas quizzes or other features available within the Canvas learning management system, feel free to email us at elearning@mtu.edu

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Canvas Quizzes, Extended Time, and the Moderate tool

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Moderate Quiz link in published Canvas Quiz

If you use Canvas quizzes frequently you’ve likely had the need to provide extra time for students with formal accommodations. This need has escalated during the current remote instruction environment as Canvas quiz usage has increased. While there is more than one way to accomplish this, using the Canvas quiz moderate feature is the best way to easily provide extra time for specific students.

Moderate this Quiz

Once you publish your Canvas classic quiz a “Moderate this Quiz” feature appears in the quiz sidebar to the right. The moderate quiz page supports several important functions:

  • View progress of student submissions
  • View number of quiz attempts taken (where appropriate)
  • Provide extra quiz attempts
  • Provide extra time (for timed quizzes)
  • Manually unlock quizzes for a specific student

To provide extra time for a student find their name from the list of all enrolled students then click on the edit icon (pencil icon) at the far right. A student extensions window will appear with options to provide extra time. The amount of time you enter there will add on to the standard time allowed for all students. Don’t forget to click Save to apply the extension changes.

Student extensions window in Canvas quiz moderate feature.
Student Extensions window in Quiz Moderate tool

If you have more than one student that needs extra time you can select multiple students (click boxes next to their names) first and then add extra time to all students as a group.

Moderate Quiz selection screen
Select multiple student and apply extensions

If you’re in a situation where you need provide additional time while a student is taking the quiz you can do that too. The moderate page shows the running time for all active students in a quiz. You can click on the clock icon for a student and add extra time to their current attempt. Review the resource guides linked below for additional details on this process.

Make sure you also assign due dates and availability dates to your quizzes. The due date is critical to remind students when the quiz must be completed. Availability dates are the open and close doors when a quiz is available. These dates can provide your students with some flexibility for when they take the exam.

There is a lot of power under the moderate page hood. If you are a regular user of Canvas quizzes you should take some time to familiarize yourself with the available features so you can react quickly when you run into an unexpected situation.

Resources

Need Help?

Contact the elearning support team in the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning if you have questions about Canvas, Huskycast, Zoom or other educational technology tools.

elearning@mtu.edu | 487-3000

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Support resources for EdTech tools

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EdTech tools: Canvas, Panopto, Zoom, iClicker, Respondus, Turnitin, Gradescope

Pandemic-induced remote instruction has required us to spend more time online supporting our students. Many people are using EdTech tools now more than ever before in their teaching careers. At Michigan Tech the “Big Three” EdTech tools are Canvas, Panopto-Huskycast, and Zoom. Using these tool effectively is critical for a successful teaching and learning experience for you and your students. Have you also found yourself “pushing” these tools to the next level? To do more with the tools you need to learn more about their capabilities. The elearning team helps instructors with that every day. But we don’t do it alone. We rely of the extensive support and training resources available from our vendors. To help you find “how-to” information more quickly we have gathered the links to the training resources for some of the most common EdTech tools you are likely using often.

EdTech Tool Support Resources
Canvas Instructor Guides
Instructor Video Guides
Student Guides
Panopto-Huskycast Guides
Video tutorials
Zoom Help Center
User Guide FAQ
Top 20 Resources
Respondus (online testing tools) Training resources
Webinars
turnitin/gradescope turnitin Feedback Studio
gradescope getting started guides
gradescope remote assessment resources
iClicker Cloud Instructor guides
Quickstart guide for remote instruction

Need Help?

Contact the elearning support team in the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning if you have questions about Canvas, Huskycast, Zoom or other educational technology tools.

elearning@mtu.edu | 487-3000

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Editing a Video

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We have all been busy lately making recordings -whether its pre-recording a lecture from your office or recording a live Zoom class session. Afterwards, we upload these recordings into the appropriate Panopto-Huskycast course folder for students to view.

Have you ever gone back and reviewed the video only to realize that the first couple minutes of the recording consisted of you still getting prepared to start your lecture or maybe the last couple minutes consisted of addressing some students’ personal questions….wouldn’t it be nice if you could quickly trim those unnecessary beginning or endings off of your recordings? Panopto-Huskycast provides a video editor within your video library which will allow you to quickly trim a section of content from your video.

Panopto Editor

Edit mode in Panopto

Login to Huskycast.mtu.edu with your Canvas credentials and find a video in your video library that you would like to edit. Hover your mouse over the video, you will notice some additional options appear including ‘Edit’. Click on ‘edit’ and the video will then open into the Panopto Editor. At the bottom of the editor, you will see a separate row for each stream captured in the video. A stream can be defined as a separate section in the editor for each video, audio or presentation content you recorded.

Panopto Editor video streams

Cut Tool

You will notice a scissors in the upper left corner just above the video streams. This is known as the cut tool and is used to trim content from the video. Let’s say you wanted to trim off the first two minutes and 14secs of your video. You would play the video and pause it after two minutes and 14 seconds. You will notice a red vertical line in the stream designating this point in the video. Next, click on the scissors. You will notice a dark gray line at the beginning and ending of the video stream. Click and drag the dark gray line at the beginning of the stream until it meets up with the red vertical line.

Select ‘Apply’ in the upper right corner of the screen when you have your edits defined. This will apply the changes. As a side note, the Panopto Editor is non-destructive…you can always add those cuts back in if you ever need to or happen to cut out the wrong content!

Additional Resources

How to edit a video

How to trim a video in the editor (including steps on trimming an individual stream)

If you would like additional support with managing your Panopto-Huskycast recordings, contact us at elearning@mtu.edu.

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