Canvas: Communication Tools

Summary: Announcements can be used to broadcast information to your students. This video will walk through the process of building an announcement. Some example uses:

• Reminders of due dates (ex: a take home exam, or a project).
• Provide supplemental information to students (ex: resources for a project).
• Announce a guest speaker event.
• Announce class cancellations.
• Announce make-up work opportunities and due date changes.
• For online courses, post an overview of the coming week as well as summarize previous week’s main points.
• Create announcements for student groups.
• Post to all sections (default) or select particular section (maybe class is cancelled for only your T, TH class).
  

Duration: 1 minute

Chat allows you to engage with students in real-time. There is 1 chatroom per course. Comments can be deleted by the instructor. 

Suggested Uses:

• Let students know there is a chat tool in the course and what it is to be used for (real-time conversation).
• Use chat to hold virtual office hours.
• Use chat as a study session before a test.
• Conduct Q&A sessions.
• Encourage students to ask content-related questions using chat so peers can learn from other student’s questions.
• If this tool is used, it is suggested to follow through and check it daily.
• If you choose not to use the tool, you can hide it in settings --> navigation tab.

Summary: The collaboration tool allows students to work in real-time on a document, spreadsheet, or presentation with other students or groups. To use this tool, you must agree to link to your VT Google Drive. 

Suggested uses:

• A place to share agendas for upcoming classes.
• Assign student groups to work collaboratively on an evolving document you can check on to formatively assess.
• Join a collaboration with a student or group virtually and offer your feedback.
• Can be used in student groups homepage.
• Create a text-based whiteboard that everyone in the classroom can see and refer to later.

This video will provide an overview of the collaboration tool.

Duration: 1 minute, 11 seconds