End of Semester

We thank you for visiting the Tip of the Day blog from the middle of March through the end of classes for the spring semester. We have published a tip each weekday, beginning on March 18, the first day of alternate teaching. In all, we have published 35 tips. To date, the blog has been visited over 1170 times. We hope it has been helpful and useful as we have navigated the unusual circumstances of alternate types of teaching and learning. 

Now that the semester instruction is over, the tips will appear less regularly, perhaps as "Tip of the Week" or more general:  "Tips for Online Language Teaching and Learning." We would love to get your input and your suggestions for future posts. If you have success stories from this semester or have developed activities that work well, please let us know and we can help spread the word. 

The daily posts up to this point will remain accessible on this site, and we will add more as we transition into the summer. 

For now, thanks for visiting, and we wish you all the best for a successful conclusion to the semester!

Ongoing Canvas Access for Students

As the semester comes to and end, instructors may take stock of the resources gathered in their course Canvas sites. Instructors may have collected more online resources for their students to use than they have in past, in-person semesters. (That’s certainly true in this blogger’s case!).

Would you like your students to continue to be able to access these resources? Good news! They can! Students will continue to have access to your course’s Canvas site, with the exception that they won’t be able to submit materials via Canvas. Which is hardly important since they will not have any assignments for the course.

There is no specific action that instructors need to take to allow students continued access to the Canvas site. All that needs to be done is to decide what the contents of the site are to be. Students will be able to access the site the same way they did all semester.

Hide your own video image in Zoom

As an instructor, you may get distracted by your own video in the Zoom window or get tired of looking at yourself. You can remove the display of your own video and still see everyone else.

Here’s how:

Hover the mouse over your own video window and click on the button with the three dots:

A menu drops down with options for your own video. Select Hide Self View from this list.

And your video feed will disappear, replaced by others’ in the gallery.

Now you can only see the participants in the meeting and can interact with them without being distracted by your own mirrored image.

Thanks to Kate Paesani for pointing out this tip.