To be honest, I am Cave-man-esque when keeping up with technological tools let alone mastering them.  I often feel that it’s just overwhelming with so many offerings, evaluating each one, and then implementing them in my class or LMS.  I only have experience with BlackBoard and Canvas. I think Canvas’ layout, user-friendliness, and navigational simplicity is much more intuitive than BB.  That being said, here are a few tools that I love to use for Canvas:

Collaboration: Google docs/Office 365 – Just a matter of preference really, what your students are more accustomed to and what your college’s LMS offers. I use this for group/class notes, projects/presentations, brainstorming/mind-mapping.  I love how everyone can see who is writing/contributing.

Quizzes/Surveys – I mainly use this to produce surveys, which I use for my students to evaluate the content of every module, evaluate/reflect on their own performance, and a final reflection/survey for the class/semester as a whole.  I love using this as data analysis along with Canvas’ Learning Analytics on how to improve my class and makes it a lot easier to give my students individualized attention and feedback. I can also migrate it to MS EXCEL to further filter data or present it in different ways. Here is an informative link on using Canvas Analytics: https://community.canvaslms.com/videos/3910-using-canvas-learning-analytics-to-improve-online-learning

Speedgrader: I love Speedgrader.  What I want to talk about thought is annotating/feedback student’s assignments/essays.  I used to provide feedback the old-fashioned way, with a (red) pen on their hard copies.  However, I grew burdened with the amounts of papers I’d have to lug around all the time and the fact that my handwriting is nearly illegible (I call it chinese hieroglyphics).  However, I found it easier in the way I can see a paper as a whole and faster than say providing feedback on Turnitin.com. I do like the Turnitin integration with Canvas, but I primarily use it just to check plagiarism.  I do want to mess around more with the PeerMark feature for online workshopping.

Although Canvas’ annotation/feedback tools aren’t perfect, it does make handwriting feedback almost obsolete and I find it way more intuitive than turnitin.  There are some bugs with it, so I’m still not completely sold. I’m very excited to start exploring annotating using a smart pen However, in my research only IPAD users were able to do it seamlessly with Canvas.  I found it ironic that IPAD supports Canvas, but Canvas doesn’t read .pages yet. I heard very recently that MS Surface Pro has made improvements in its surface pen’s integration with Canvas, but I haven’t heard any recent updates regarding how seamless it is now.  For both capabilities, it takes a lot of $$$$ to own an IPAD or Surface Pro, but I think that it may be worth the investment to be able to grade and mark up my student’s essays that way.

However, the tools that Curry provided in the annotated bibliography are making me explore other ways to annotate my students’ papers.

NameCoach/Attendance – I am horrible with remembering/memorizing names and putting it to faces.  I use the attendance tool, both list and seating chart, name coach, google sheets, creating their own account/bio on Canvas, and daily attendance questions to help me remember and how to address them by their preferred nick name or gender pronoun.  

• One tool/assignment I do want to incorporate with their account/personal bio and maybe an ice breaker or an extension of an ice breaker activity is Padlet, Pixar Story Spine, and Adobe Spark to create their own digital stories/bios.  

Some tools I want to learn and implement:

• Screencast: One tool that this course uses and that Curry recommended on giving essay/assignment feedback.
• Canvas ARC: I use videos in-class, but not my online classes; this would be a great tool to start incorporating lessons and assignments on videos.
• Flipgrid- Again, another video tool that can do a variety of things.
• Kahoot- I’m all about trying to make my online class more into an interactive video game, so I think this platform helps do that.
• Poll Everywhere: This survey tool can be used in the classroom or online and can be embedded with powerpoints or google slides, etc..  I plan to use this alongside quizzes/surveys and the analytics/reflections/evaluations of my classroom.
• Adobe Spark: I want to get more mastery behind this tool, specifically for student portfolio applications.  
• Prezi – I’m a little embarrassed to say that most of my presentations are still in powerpoint.  I’ve migrated a few into Prezi, but definitely still a neanderthal in this regard. I’m hoping to use more prezi for instruction, but also navigational or orientation purposes (like Curry’s example).
• Microsoft sway

****One thing that I’m not sure if there is a tool or app yet for it, but I would love to be able to create lectures using animation and an avatar.  Like I said in my previous post, I cringe when I record my lectures and think it would be fun to record my lectures, but turn them into an anime form and an avatar.  

2 Important Takeaways from Chapter 3 of Teaching Writing Online: 

1. The importance of having a backup plan (or several back up plans)
2. Virtual Worlds – Second life – I have never heard of this and plan on exploring it further