Learning Activities – Ferally Educated

The Haunted Garage: Interactive Online Space using Mozilla Hubs

Chris Lambert, the Learning Resources Coordinator at the USask Language Centre (USLC), works with international students, studying remotely and F2F. As part of what she calls “Free-Range Fridays” Chris designed a Mozilla Hubs interactive space for students to learn more about the tradition of celebrating Halloween. With a mix of language students from all levels …

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Hidden Gem: Canvas Student Annotation Assignment

In the May 15th Canvas release a new Assignment submission type was added. The Student Annotation Submissions allow you to upload a digital file and have students annotate the file and then submit it all within the assignment editor. This simple submission type has big potential depending on how you design the learning activity. In …

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USask Instructor Engages Students with Escape Room Learning Activities

This past year Dr. Michel Gravel, a faculty member in Chemistry in the College of Arts & Science, challenged his students by developing an “escape room” activity using WebEx and a variety of tool options in Canvas. After creating a series of “locked doors” using the quiz tool and module requirements in Canvas, with content …

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Share your Synchronous Success

We’re starting an interactive component to the DEU Digest this week and we need your great ideas to make it a success. Share with us, and your fellow USask instructors, some of the best synchronous learning activities you used to engage students over this past year. Write a short description of your best synchronous learning …

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The Case of the Missing Journal

One of the glaring omissions from the Canvas LMS toolkit is the Learning Journal. This tool often provided a personal space for student reflection where instructors could see evidence of learning from each student’s perspective. In Blackboard Learn there was a dedicated tool called Journals that allowed for these entries to be collected, shared and …

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Offline Activities in an Online Class

For many students, a completely online fall term will be a major change. Aside from the obvious challenges of getting comfortable with the learning technologies they’ll be presented in each of their classes, students will be challenged further with screen fatigue. Taking a full load of courses online is not a common strategy for most …

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Promoting Peer to Peer Participation

Remote Teaching and Learning does not need to be a self isolating experience for your students. Although we’re all working from home and keeping our distance there’s no reason we can’t work together. In this post we’ll give you few ideas and tools to get students interacting with peer to peer activities and supports. Peer …

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Remote Teaching with Video

Keeping your course fresh and interesting throughout the term can be challenging in an online environment. Especially if you’ve had to rush to prepare a remote teaching version of an otherwise live course. One of the many ways we can keep things interesting is with the use of video. Students will appreciate the opportunity to …

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Class Communications at a Distance

Communicating with your students is the number one way to keep them on track and engaged in the topic of your course. But when the physical classroom is not an option how do we keep the lines of communication open between the instructor, the students, and their peers? Here’s some tips and tools for making …

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Creating Engaging Learning Activities

In order to cross over from passive content consumption into active learning, you will need to make real-life activities the focus of your course content (Hayes, 2015). Activities can be discussions, interactive activities, project or problem based assignments, blogging, and curation assignments – or could even involve learners themselves creating content and activities such as …

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