1. Planning Equitable & Inclusive Assessments
One of my unofficial goals this year is to ramp up how we as educators approach designing items; whether it’s a single activity, whole unit, or assessments, and provide resources that help change our thinking. I like things that I can refer to and these two tweets, which I found way back in my bookmarks on Twitter exemplify exactly what I’m going for.
In the first tweet, the flowchart has questions such as asking if you have created multiple opportunities for students to show learning or if students can self-assess where they feel they are. I like it so much, I will either print and post it in my office or keep a copy in my notebook for coaching cycles, or I may do both!
The second tweet again represents how UDL can be used to further design assessments, be it formative or summative, allowing students to show what they know in ways other than a traditional multiple choice test. View this graphic in Google Slides.
Oh, and if anyone has suggestions for how to clean up your bookmarks on Twitter, I’m all ears… 😉
2. Creating Accessible Links
One of the things I have seen our new teachers struggle with this year is how to create accessible links in Canvas. They so badly want to put the raw URL into assignments or use the dreaded “click here”. I can’t blame them necessarily as I just struggled to come up with the proper words to create the link above. Which sent me down a rabbit hole…how do you make proper in-text links? A quick Google search popped up the following articles:
- Making Accessible Links: 15 Golden Rules For Developers: In this article, I learned not to use the word “link” in the phrase I want to link as a screen reader will indicate that a phrase is a link. I had no idea. You also shouldn’t capitalize links as a screen reader will read these as separate letters. This makes sense as most text that is capitalized tends to be abbreviations.
- Michigan Tech Guide on Descriptive Link Text: I found this guide to be slightly more helpful as it is more descriptive of what a screen reader will read when encountering a link and gives more examples of what to do and not do. For example, if your link text is “Weekly Finds,” then the screen reader will say “link Weekly Finds” and the user will know that the webpage being linked to is likely about my Weekly Finds post. If instead, your link text is “click here,” the screen reader will say link click here and the user will have no idea what the linked webpage may be about.
3. Canva in Canvas
I’m so excited about this integration! A few of us in my division tried it earlier last year and it didn’t work as smoothly as we had hoped, but at the recent Canva Create conference, they announced that Canva is free for all educators and students, so I think there was a big upgrade. The below video shows exactly what we were hoping for as far as setting up an assignment directly in Canvas.
One difference from the above video is that I didn’t have any templates show up in the window and had to search for one. This took me out of the window and into the design editor and then I had to figure out where all the right buttons were. If you’ve used Canva before, the button that usually says “share” is replaced by “Publish to Canvas”. Then you can choose to embed it into your Canvas assignment and can pick back up with the video.
This next video shows how students edit the template and turn it in.
This will work for most Canvas users but will be slightly different if your school is using the Elementary Dashboard. After students edit the template and go back to Canvas, they don’t see a “start assignment” button. Instead, they will scroll down and see the submission options of adding a website URL or uploading a file. Students will need to click on “more” where the 3 dots are and select “Canva for Education”. Then they will select the design they were working on. Then they can click on “submit assignment”.
Check out Canva’s YouTube channel to see how to integrate it into Microsoft Teams, Schoology, and Google Classroom.
4. A Framework for Choosing Edtech
There are several tools out there that will help you with choosing the right edtech tools, such as SAMR and TPack, but this Edutopia article A Handy Framework for Choosing Edtech by Tolulope Noah is a little different singling out content, context, creed, channels, choice, and cauliflower. That’s right, the versatile vegetable gets highlighted in edtech too!
5. Add Emojis to a Google Doc
Did you know you can search for and add emojis to Google Docs while typing? This would be great for reflections and feedback or to highlight something important in a doc. Great thinking!
What’s your favorite weekly find this week? Do you have a find to share and think it should be featured? Leave a comment below!
You can see all Weekly Finds in this Wakelet collection.
Ms Priester EDU 