We’re about a month into school, so it’s a good time to see where we are with our technology usage.
Office 365 & Canvas Adoption
Some good news here! Students are overwhelmingly logging in to Canvas – 88% access it daily, making it the tool you should use if you’re distributing content. Ditto for Office 365 groups, our preferred tool for collaborating in departments, clubs, etc. In our first month of school, the number of groups grew from 100 to 187 among students and faculty and the number of files stored in groups rose from 34,000 to 52,000.
We do have some work to do, though. Anecdotally, we know that students don’t read their email enough. Now we have a number: 64%. That’s the percentage of emails that our students read. So please reinforce the message to your students that they need to read their emails daily!
QR Codes in the Classroom
Our parents and students LOVE QR codes – those square, pixellated images you see everywhere. Did you know you can make them yourself, for free? Simply go to http://www.qr-code-generator.com/ and paste in the URL.
But what if you want to get a URL for a Word, PPT or PDF document? Simply upload it to OneDrive (it should be there already, wink wink) and copy the sharing link. Don’t forget to uncheck the Allow Editing box first.
Once you have that, you can use QR codes to mix online and offline content. Just Google “qr codes in the classroom” or visit this blog post to get a lot of dieas.
Get the Latest Office 2016 and OneDrive clients
We’re still seeing staff members without the latest Office 2016 and OneDrive clients! If you stop by the IT office we can get them set up for you in a jiffy!
Trouble Accessing Canvas
If you have a problem loading Canvas off-campus, try using your phone’s mobile hotspot. We have heard a few reports of trouble using Canvas on China Telecom, but it works fine on China Mobile and China Unicom.
PowerTeacher Pro Not Exempting Grades
Powerschool is still working to resolve an issue in which Practice assignment standard grades aren’t being exempted. This is only the issue the first time after you create each assignment. If you go back to an assignment where this is a problem and uncheck the “Count in Grade” box, the change will stick and your grades will be exempted properly. We’ll post a notice here when PowerSchool resolves the issue.