PC users, have you ever wondered how to remove a section from the middle of an mp4 video file, as opposed to trimming a portion from the beginning and/or end of the video?
There is a native app, Video Explorer, that is part of the Photos app in Windows. A clip from the middle of a video can be removed using Video Explorer. The video below demonstrates the process.
As students are more routinely completing exams and classroom tasks asynchronously, the security of our documents has become more complicated. While there is no perfect solution yet, the ability to lockdown a Google doc so that students cannot print or copy the text of the document can provide a modicum of reassurance and security.
1. Click on the blue “Share” button in the top right corner.
2. Then click on the small gear in the top right corner of the pop-up.
**Note: You must be the “Owner” of the document in order for this feature to be available.
3. Uncheck the box next to “Viewers and commenters can see the option to download, print, and copy.”
To add an extra level of security, you can also set limits for when the students can have access to that document.
1. Click on the blue “Share” button in the top right corner.
2. Type in and select the user’s name or x500.
3. Uncheck the “Notify people” option.
4. Click on the drop-down menu under “Editor” and select “Viewer.”
5. Then click the blue “Share” button.
6. Go back into the share settings by clicking the blue “Share” button in the top right corner again.
7. Click on the drop-down menu under “Viewer” next to the name of the person whose access you would like to limit.
8. In that drop down menu, select “Give temporary access” and set the end date for the student’s access to expire.
**Note: Unfortunately, you will have to do this for each individual student, but after their access expires, students will not be able to see the document any more.
Of course, these measures cannot stop students from using their phones to take a picture of the screen, and students can still use the “print screen” feature to copy the images, but this allows for some increased security of documents.
I recommend using these features in conjunction with Proctorio, set so that students may only open “in-quiz” links. That way, you lock down the “print screen” feature as well.
Need to assign media stored on LC Elevator to your students? Make it easy for them by using the nifty Elevator / Canvas integration or LTI, and embed the media directly in your Canvas course page! Here’s how:
LC Elevator will need to be enabled within your Canvas course site before you can begin using it. Within your course site, select "settings," which is near the bottom of the left-hand column. Next select "apps."
You should see an icon for Elevator. Click this icon and select “+ Add App.”
In the field that says "What is the name (URL) of the instance you'd like to use?", enter lc.elevator.umn.edu. (You just need to change the default text before the first period from “dcl” to “lc”. Now click the "Add App" button.
Now you’re ready to use the Canvas/Elevator integration! If it doesn’t work yet, wait a minute or two and try again.
In Edit mode, the top menu includes the Rich Content Editor (RCE), which allow you to embed a variety of media on a Canvas page:
Because the options in this menu are extensive the menu is often to wide to fit on the screen. In this case, the menu is truncated, and only the first few text-focused icons are visible:
The three vertical dots at the right indicate that this menu of icons is expandable.
Click on the vertical ellipsis icon on the far right-hand side of the top menu to expand it:
This will display more options, including all of the methods for embedding media in Canvas, with the next icon on the list selected (in this case, the link icon):
Click on the carrot next to the icon that looks like a plug. This will display all of the third-party apps you have installed.
This will launch the main page of LC Elevator. From there, you can search for your media. Once you have located your media, select the streaming image under “Streaming Video” or “Streaming Audio". There may be two Streaming Video options: one called “Streaming with Subtitles," and another called “Streaming without Subtitles."
Note: Be careful to select a Streaming icon, NOT Cover Art. If you select Cover Art, your Canvas page will have an image that looks playable to students, but is as static as a piece of cover art.
Some LC Elevator records have multiple streaming files associated with them. The asset with the red box around it is the one you are adding to Canvas.
Click on the “Add to Canvas” button on the top left-hand corner, and you’re done! Note: this button is white and is easy to miss.
Students will be able to play the media within the Canvas page, or for video content, expand and watch full screen.
NOTE: If this is the first time you try to embed a video in a Canvas page from Elevator, you may need to select the Language Center Library from a larger dialog box, in order to make it readily available. A clue to this step is if the plug-in icon in the RCE menubar does not include a downward-pointing caret:
Follow the steps above to embed the video on the page. From now on, the interface should appear as it does above, with the caret displayed on the plug-in button.
Many syllabi include some type of interpersonal speaking activity or assessment. Prior to Covid-19, use of the Digital Language Lab (DiLL) in Jones Hall was the most popular way to pair students randomly and record their conversation. It was efficient, because all student pairs could be recorded at the same time, and the MP3 files could be accessed later on the instructor's personal computer. Over the past few months, instructors have experimented with how to replicate this system using Zoom. After some trial and error, we want to share with you our crowd-sourced best practices on how to record student conversations in Zoom breakout rooms. With this method, students record the conversations themselves and upload the digital files to Canvas to share them with the instructor. If you plan to use this method for an assessment, we recommend practicing the steps with students the day before. This will help both you and your students be more comfortable when the stakes are higher.
1. Click on Participants from the lower menu bar
2. Manually, allow students to record by hovering over their names in the Participants list > Click more > Allow record
1. If you have information or texts students should use during the conversation, you can post them in the main room chat now. Students will still be able to see it once they are in their breakout rooms.
1. Click on Breakout rooms from the lower menu bar
2. Enter the number of rooms needed based on the number of students (by half)
3. Select Assign automatically participants. This will randomize groups.
4. Click Options and Select Automatically move all participants into breakout rooms.
1. Tell students they should each now click Record to begin recording. Although they are in the main room now, their individual recording will seamlessly move with them into the breakout room and later back to the main room.
1. Click on Open all rooms
2. Click on Broadcast message to give students any reminders or time warnings as they record
1. Click on Close all breakout rooms.
2. Once students are back in the main room, students should click on the gray square to Stop recording. Make sure students have not only paused the recording. They must completely stop it for the recording to be saved.
1. Explain to students that the recordings will be generated once you end the meeting.
2. Share your screen, review process for locating Zoom files in their computers
3. Review uploading procedures in the Canvas assignment.
In German 1004, I usually do an in-class activity where I give each student a sheet of a paper with a historical event on it, and ask them to move themselves into chronological order. I call this a "living timeline." This semester, I'm using Jamboard to create a timeline of events mentioned in their textbook. Even though students have seen these events in a timeline in their textbook, they often still struggle to remember when the various events happened.
To recreate the “hands-on” aspect of students organizing themselves into chronological order, I made a timeline on a Jamboard and had them work in small groups to put the events in the proper order.
1. In Google Slides, go to the Insert menu, click on “diagram”, and you will have several choices.
2. I created the timeline, and then saved it as a JPEG file. Go to File menu, click on download, and save as JPEG.
1. On my “German history” Jamboard, I uploaded the image of the timeline.
2. Then I created sticky notes with various events on them.
3. Finally, I made copies of this frame for each small group of students to use in class to organize their own timelines.
When you work in Edit mode in Canvas, you have access to many of the basic formatting tools you need to maintain your course site, including Bold, Italics and Font Size. What you won't see are less commonly used, but sometimes essential formatting options like Strikethrough and Alignment Justify.
The good news is that you are not limited to the basic visible formatting tools. You can access additional formatting options, but it requires a couple of extra steps.
While you are in Edit mode, click into the area where you type your content so that you can see the cursor blinking.
Mac Users: press Option + FN + F9
PC Users: press ALT + F9. If that does not work try ALT + FN + F9
Note: these keys may be hard to find on your keyboard. If you don’t see them prominently represented, look for the smaller text at the top or bottom of the key. Depending on the size of your keyboard, one key may fill multiple roles. On a Mac, the Option key is also the ALT key. The FN and Option or ALT keys are probably on the bottom left row of your keyboard and the F9 is probably on the top row.
This combination of keystrokes, will give you access to a Menu Bar that includes Format:
Select Format and use the editing tool of your choice!
When you are done, hit Save, and the extra formatting options will disappear.
Thank you to Ginny Steinhagan for suggesting this topic, and reaching out to IT Help when she wanted to strike through a word and found that she could not do this as easily as she expected!
One of my favorite in-person classroom activities is to move real or toy objects about the classroom and between students. This might be "moving furniture" into a certain room or location or asking for and receiving a piece of food or clothing. Such activities are useful to practice vocabulary, prepositions, command forms, direct and indirect objects, and even register. Depending on who I am giving the object to, I may need to use different pronouns.
How can I recreate this engaging and interactive exercise in the online environment? With Jamboard, of course! The basic principle is to use images of people, places, and things and then drag and drop them into a new location. I can create a background scene of a house, for example, or images of different kinds of people in each corner of the frame. On a new layer, I create individual items such as a chair, bed, blanket, toys or book. I can respond to a partner's command, such as "Put the couch in the bedroom. Put the blanket on the couch." Similarly, I can narrate my actions, such as "I'm giving the children the toys, but I'm giving the grandfather a book." Obviously, this type of activity can be adapted for use in many different contexts.
My specific example comes from a unit on travel, in which we practice direct and indirect objects by giving travel items to different people.
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As a homework assignment, students were asked to move the objects around the frame and describe the action taking place. For this purpose, each student copied the Jamboard for individual use. The next day during class, the task shifted to small groups of students, who worked together on one frame, listening to and watching each other and providing feedback as needed.
1. You can use the tools in Jamboard to design your frame. For example, click on the image icon to search for pictures of people. Position each image in a different section of the frame. Add drawings, shapes, or text boxes as desired. Once you like the composition you have created, save the entire frame as an image. Click on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner and select "Save Frame as Image." This saves the composition as a whole and the individual parts are no longer moveable. This new image will be saved on your computer. You will need to find it to upload it into Jamboard in the next step. (You can also create the background image in another tool, such as Powerpoint. Just be sure to save it as an image file, JPEG.)
1. In Jamboard, click on the add image icon, navigate to your saved image from the previous step, and upload the image into the frame.
2. Resize the background image as desired.
3. This background image is now the bottom layer of the frame. Anything you add from now on will be on top of the background layer. You will be able to move the new items without altering anything in the background layer.
1. Decide which pictures you will need for the project. You may have images already saved on your computer. You may want to conduct a Google Search for images with language or country specific criteria and save them to your computer. You can also just use the Google search function built into Jamboard.
2. Click on the add image icon, navigate to your saved image, and upload the image into the frame. Resize as necessary and drag to it's starting position.
3. Repeat this process for as many draggable images you want for the project.
1. When students first see the completed frame, it is not apparent what the task is. To introduce the activity and practice the necessary vocabulary before moving the objects around, I created several frames introducing the images and providing written examples of the sentences students will create while moving the objects. In a physical classroom, I would have written this information on the whiteboard for reference during the activity.
To use the Jamboard with small groups during a Zoom session, you will need to duplicate the last frame multiple times (enough for each group to have its own frame.) See this post from last week on how to duplicate frames.
Last week I introduced Jamboard, a collaborative whiteboard that is part of the Google-suite of applications. If you've started to use it, you've probably noticed that there are relatively few menu items. On the one hand, this simplifies use of the tool by reducing the number of options you have; on the other hand, there are times when you feel that a basic functionality just seems to be missing. Documentation of how to use Jamboard remains sparse and can be confusing, since functionality of the application for the web browser differs from the physical Jamboard product. In this blogpost, I provide tips on how to find some hidden menus and how to use keyboard shortcuts for common actions.
If you are using Jamboard for small group work, each group needs to have its own frame to work in. You do not need to manually rebuild each frame! Simply duplicate the frame for as many groups you have.
1. Click on the downward carat below the frame number to expand the frame bar.
2. Click on the three vertical dots in the right upper corner of the frame you want to duplicate.
3. Click on "duplicate frame."
You likely have seen the button to "clear frame" and perhaps even clicked on it by mistake. If you search for an "undo" button, you won't find one! If you or your students accidentally wipe out everything on the frame, you can restore it immediately.
Undo clear frame = Mac: Command + Z
PC: Control + Z
This key combination works to undo your last action. To undo the undo, or to repeat the action you have just undone, use Command + Y (Mac) or Control + Y (PC).
The familiar keyboard shortcuts for cut/paste or copy/paste work on objects on the same frame or between different frames. Since you cannot drag and drop items from one frame to another, these keyboard shortcuts are very helpful.
Cut: Command / Control + X
Copy: Command / Control + C
Paste: Command / Control + V
Duplicate is actually the one menu item that consistently appears whenever you click on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner of the item selected. The keyboard shortcut, however, is also an option.
Duplicate: Command / Control + D
These keyboard shortcuts work very nicely in Jamboard, AND in most other programs on your computer. Try them in your next Google Doc as well.
Zoom is constantly under construction, with updates providing new and improved features and functionality. One of the most asked for features of Zoom is allowing students to move from one breakout room to another. This is now possible, as of Zoom version 5.3. In order to benefit from the functionality of the latest Zoom version, all of the participants need the latest version. Students will not be able to choose their own breakout room, for example, if they are still using a version of Zoom prior to 5.3.
The easiest way to upgrade your version of Zoom is through the Zoom menu.
A second way to check for updates is in the Zoom application interface:
Click on your portrait at the top right of the Zoom App, and select Check for Updates
The dialog window that appears will let you know whether you are up to date, and also indicates what has changed in the most recent versions:
Click Update to install the most current version of Zoom.
Now when you check for updates through the Zoom menu, you will receive a message that you are up to date:
If you plan to use any of the new functionalities in your Zoom sessions, please request that all students update to the latest version.
Look for upcoming tips on how to take advantage of some of the new features of Zoom 5.3!
How many Google Docs are in your drive? How many folders? What about those Shared drives? How often do you really need or want to see the folders that are five years old?
I was recently on campus (really) and decided to visit the Walk-in Tech-help station in the Student Union for help with my ever-expanding Google Drive. I had been frustrated that I had to scroll through pages of folders in search of the few I now use on a daily basis. Some were folders within folders, followed by all the individual documents within those folders. Ugh!
I originally thought many of these items were simply duplicates and that they could be condensed or deleted. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Deleting a file/folder in one place would delete it completely. Thankfully, my on-campus visit was not in vain. I learned about the feature of "starring" folders. Similar to only seeing a selection of courses on your Canvas Dashboard, when you click on "starred" in the Google Drive menu, you only see the folders you have currently selected to show. One of the greatest benefits of this feature is that you can include files from "My Drive" and any of your "Shared Drives" in the starred area. I no longer need to switch back and forth between My Drive and Shared Drives when I go about my daily business.
To add a file or folder to your starred area:
1. Right-click a file or folder and select Add to Starred
To see only your starred files or folders:
1. On the left navigation panel, click Starred.
Breakout rooms are a useful and popular feature of zoom.
In my experience as a language instructor and having provided zoom support for large synchronous meetings of other courses, I have observed that students tend to be more engaged and contribute more to large group discussions after they return from a small group discussion.
Small group discussions are often used during in-person instruction. They can also be productive in online instruction. For example: using breakout rooms as a portion of an online version of a “think-pair-share” activity, where students think about a topic individually, discuss the topic in a small group, or “pair”, then everyone reports back to the whole class.
I have observed that even a short ice-breaker at the outset of class serves nicely as a warm-up and students seem more willing and likely to contribute to a large-class discussion than if they had no chance to talk in a smaller group setting. The breakout room activities can serve as warm-ups that might lead to a more structured, more in-depth, content-driven think-pair-share activity, or they could simply get students to engage with one another in preparation for a larger class discussion.
