Extending Canvas

So a faculty member asked me a few days ago how she can put things in canvas that will make it more fun for students. ANGEL had graded crosswords, and a couple of other tools that could be added in.

Apps

Canvas is building an App Center, just like on iPhones and android devices, you can add functionality to your canvas courses through something called an LTI (Learning Tool Integration) and there are already a few really good ones.

When you’re editing content in BTC’s canvas, you’ll see the above tools, Youtube, Khan Academy and another drop down which includes Quizlet and Educreations. These are LTI’s I’ve added campus wide, and I’ll be adding a few more as they mature.

To add an app to your course, go to your Course > Settings > Apps and choose one from there.

Each app needs some special information to be added to your course so it can be identified. So please talk to stoo with help on how to do this. If you want to explore this on your own, check out the canvas guide.

If you just want to browse to see what’s available, you can go to http://www.edu-apps.org/

Good ones of note:

• Redirect Tool — adds a permanent link to the left hand navigation of your course
• Quizlet — embed community created or custom created flash cards to your course
• TED Ed — search for and embed educational TED talks to your course
• Slideshare — add community created or custom presentations (like PPTs) to your course

Embedding Content

There are so many embeddable tools out there. Embedding means to take a piece of content that exists somewhere on the web, and insert it into a Content Page in canvas. The best example of this is when you see a youtube video on another website. The video exists on youtube’s servers, but the content is actually showing on another page.

One neat tool a colleague told me about last week was ThingLink, a web tool that lets you had interactive elements to an image — like video, text, etc. Once you’re done creating your thinglink, you can embed it into your course!

Now, if you want to add something specific, like a crossword, just go to google and search for something like ‘Online Crossword generator embed’ and you’ll usually find a tool that will work.

If all else fails, you can create some content elsewhere and just link to it!

Happy expanding!