Canvas LMS
The 2020-2021 academic school year required me to lean very heavily on the tools and supports of Canvas. It also caused me to become very reflective and purposeful on the concepts of accessibility and equity for students and parents. Included on this page are few highlights of the yearlong commitment I have made to making blended instruction accessible for my students and for the faculty of Seven Lakes High School.
Course Selection Process
An importable module for English teachers to disseminate pertinent information to students about the course selection process for 2021-2022. Complete with all resources provided by the counselors and assignment submission locations for KVA students to submit a copy of their course selection worksheets.
Student-Friendly Technology Tips & Tricks Module
This module includes education technology tutorials and foundational technology skills tutorials for students from Sam Kary, a veteran middle school teacher and instructional coach via The New Ed-Tech Classroom Student Tutorials YouTube channel.
Canvas Course Personalization
I take great pride in the work I have committed to making my course accessible and equitable for my English Learners. However, as I also believe - these practices are also very beneficial for on-level and gifted students in that they all belong to a generation of "digital natives" who perform well with visual and readily available information. That is why I design my courses to feature functional buttons for programs and resources they will constantly use for class on the homepage of each class and embed these same types of features within assignments and pages of the course as well.
Module Labels
While laying out my course for blended instruction, I realized two things would be important for my students: consistency of format and ease of visibility for the switchover from the desktop to the mobile application.
For consistency of format, I always take care to dedicate a separate module for every week of a grading period and outfit it with section headers of the day of the week and the date. For each I assignment, I elect to label which assessments will be considered major and minor grades at the start of the assignment's title. This helps students to quickly find a task and also helps with my grading in Canvas when scrolling through the Gradebook feature. I also use keyboard emojis from the JoyPixels Chrome Extension to help with distinguishing the text headers from an assignment. This actually helps students a lot with visibility when using Canvas through a mobile device because; as seen in the photograph, the text headers and assignments maintain the same font and do not always show an indention.
Access Points
The future of classroom instruction will require teachers to consider accessibility as a feature of their courses and as a means of differentiation. This assignment demonstrates how I achieve that with my blended, Sheltered English III section by offering students the option to print the task and complete it by hand or complete it digitally through Google Slides. This particularly became a concern of mine when I realized that the "playing field" of distance learning was different for each student. Some students needed a tangible product, others preferred it all to be on a screen. Some students had printers to use at home or within their apartment communities, others did not. Providing these options "quietly" achieves the goal of equity in the classroom without making it a big deal to disadvantaged students.