[UPDATE May 25, 2022] Canvas: New Quizzes

A couple months ago I shared a note about New Quizzes – a new quiz engine being developed in Canvas. In that post I share a couple known issues. One of those was that manually graded questions were not appearing on the Dashboard in the To Do list for instructors.

I am pleased to share that the Instructure development team has implemented this capability for New Quizzes. It is now possible to receive a to-do notification for manually graded items within quizzes. You can see an example notification below.

A notification link to grade a New Quizzes quiz question.
New Quizzes To Do List item

Another update Instructure shared relates to the Fill In the Blank question type. It is now possible for instructors to use the rich content editor as they create fill-in-the-blank questions. The provides more formatting options and the ability to integrate formulas into the questions. This video (2:22) demonstrates the expanded capability.

Listen Notes Podcast Search Engine

Block letters spelling the words "Listen Notes."

I am new to podcasting, but recently came across what I think is a cool tool for those interested in podcasts. There are applications of this site that may make it a powerful pedagogical tool.

Listen Notes is a search engine for podcasts. You might wonder why a person might want such a thing when there is Google, but hopefully this post might share some reasons why. Listen Notes allows you to search for podcast episodes by keyword or topic. It can be a great way to find content you are interested in and discover new podcasts.

In addition to the search function, Listen Notes provides a Listen Later list. A person can save podcasts or single episodes to this list to listen to … later. Here is an example of my initial Listen Later list. One can even subscribe to the Listen Later feed in a podcast app to a curated list of episodes. In the words of the creator/developer, “it is like Pocket / Instapaper for podcasts.” This function alone can be valuable for someone looking for content about a specific topic. It can serve as a support in a personal learning network.

This same function could be used to create publicly available curated lists of episodes. These lists can be curated collaboratively. I could see this function being used by an instructor to curate a list of episodes for a class or for having students create a curated list on a given topic.

I am excited to use this new-to-me tool and to see how I can leverage it to increase my own learning and support others’ learning.

Outlook: Canned Messages

My previous employer made use of GSuite for Education. One thing I have missed from Gmail is canned responses. These allowed me to create and save recurring responses or bits of text that I could insert into other messages. I found out today that this is possible to do in Outlook. Creating these messages is such a time saver. Check the link below to read about how to set it up.

Microsoft Office Support | Create reusable text blocks for email messages

Pro Tip: if you want to make it easier to use your Quick Parts you can add Quick Parts to the new message Quick Launch area. To do so navigate to the item on the ribbon, right-click and select, “Add to Quick Launch.” Then the Quick Parts are only a click away. The animated GIF below illustrates the steps mentioned.

Steps to add Quick Parts to Quick Launch.