Tag: canvas

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Tech-knowledge-y Thursdays: Bite sized tech training, when you need it

Have 30 minutes? Learn something new!

This fall, the Harte Center is continuing our Tech-knowledge-y Thursdays, a weekly opportunity to take a quick break from the usual Thursday routine and explore a technology, tool, or practice that might make your teaching or work a little easier, a little more effective, or at least a little more fun!

Join us every Thursday from 10–10:30 a.m. in M11, Leyburn Library, beginning September 17. Sessions will alternate between Gradescope and generative AI topics, led by Brandon and Helen.

Thursdays, two kinds of tech-knowledge

Gradescope with Brandon
Gradescope is a new assessment and grading tool recently licensed for use at W&L and integrated with Canvas. We’ll start with the basics: What exactly is Gradescope? How does it work? How do you get it into your Canvas course? Once everyone has the lay of the land, future sessions will get more specific, exploring different assignment types, grading workflows, rubrics, and ways Gradescope can help make the grading process more efficient.

Generative AI with Helen
On alternating Thursdays, Helen will lead explorations of generative AI tools and practices. These sessions will focus on practical possibilities for using AI thoughtfully in teaching and other aspects of academic work.

No tech expertise required

Tech-knowledge-y Thursdays are designed to be short, practical, and approachable. You don’t have to be a tech enthusiast, an AI expert, or someone who knows what every button in Canvas does.

Come to one session. Come to all of them. Bring your questions. Bring your curiosity. 

The goal isn’t to add another thing to your to-do list. It’s to give you 30 minutes to see what’s out there and decide what might be worth trying.

Come for the tech. Stay for the knowledge. Leave with something you can try.

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Gear Up for the Fall Term 2026: Explore Harte Center Sessions at Fall Academy!

 

Promotional graphic for Washington and Lee University Fall Academy 2026. A campus scene with vibrant autumn foliage, orange and red leaves, a lantern-style campus light, and a Washington and Lee University banner featuring the university coat of arms. An open notebook and pen rest in the foreground. The text reads “Fall Academy 2026” and “View the full schedule and sign up at go.wlu.edu/fallacademy.” A campus building appears in the background amid fall colors.

As we prepare for another exciting academic year, the Harte Center team is hosting a full roster of Fall Academy sessions designed to support your teaching, spark new ideas, and streamline your digital workflow.

Whether you’re looking to polish your Canvas course layout, explore AI reasoning strategies, or connect with colleagues around wellness and pedagogy, there’s something on the schedule for everyone.

Check out the full list of sessions, organized by date and theme below! Sign up at go.wlu.edu/fallacademy!

📅 Schedule at a Glance (Chronological)

Monday, Aug 17

  • Organize Your Courses with Canvas (Brandon Bucy) — 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM | Leyburn Library 301
  • The Worst (AI) Professor (JT Torres & Jeff Schatten) — 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM | Leyburn Library 119
  • Canvas Basics (Helen MacDermott) — 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Parmly Hall 302

Tuesday, Aug 18

  • Design Magic in Minutes: Create Your Next Flyer with Adobe Express (Helen MacDermott) — 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Leyburn Library 301
  • Improve In-Class Time with Canvas (Brandon Bucy) — 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM | Leyburn Library 301

Wednesday, Aug 19

  • Gradescope + Canvas: Smarter Assessment, Faster Feedback (Brandon Bucy & Charlotte Hoopes) — 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM | Leyburn Library 109

Friday, Aug 21

  • Prompt Engineering 2.0: Reasoning & Logic Strategies (Helen MacDermott) — 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM | Leyburn Library 109
  • Canvas Basics (Helen MacDermott) — 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM | Parmly Hall 302

Tuesday, Aug 25

  • Peer Classroom Observations (JT Torres) — 11:45 AM – 1:15 PM | Leyburn Library 119
  • Engaging Students In Class and Out: Online Polling and Annotating Tools (Brandon Bucy) — 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM | Leyburn Library 109

Wednesday, Aug 26

  • Wellness By Course Design (JT Torres & Laura Ulmer) — 10:45 AM – 11:45 AM | Leyburn Library 119
  • Teagle Funding Opportunities for You (JT Torres et al.) — 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM | Leyburn Library 119
  • Prompt Justice: Getting AI Agents to Do the Right Thing (Sybil Prince Nelson & Josh Fairfield) — 1:45 PM – 3:15 PM | Leyburn Library 119
  • Improve In-Class Time with Canvas (Brandon Bucy) — 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM | Leyburn Library 301

Thursday, Aug 27

  • Record Your Classes and Manage Course Videos with YuJa, Zoom, and Camtasia (Brandon Bucy) — 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM | Leyburn Library 109
  • Organize Your Courses with Canvas (Brandon Bucy) — 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM | Leyburn Library 301

Friday, Aug 28

  • Learning Curve Fellowship: How Looking at the World as a Novice Makes Us Better Teachers (JT Torres) — 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM | Leyburn Library 119

  • How to Ban AI in Your Classroom (Sybil Prince Nelson) — 11:45 AM – 1:15 PM | Leyburn Library 119

💡 Explore by Focus Area

1. Canvas & Course Foundations

Build a clean, accessible course hub to keep students on track from day one:

  • Canvas Basics — Mon, Aug 17 (2:00 PM) | Fri, Aug 21 (3:00 PM)
  • Organize Your Courses with Canvas — Mon, Aug 17 (8:30 AM) | Thu, Aug 27 (3:00 PM)
  • Improve In-Class Time with Canvas — Tue, Aug 18 (1:00 PM) | Wed, Aug 26 (3:30 PM)

2. EdTech, Multimedia & Assessment

Level up your toolkit with tools for engaging discussions, efficient grading, and quick graphics:

  • Design Magic in Minutes: Adobe Express Flyers — Tue, Aug 18 (11:00 AM)
  • Gradescope + Canvas: Smarter Assessment — Wed, Aug 19 (10:30 AM)
  • Online Polling and Annotating (Poll Everywhere & Perusall) — Tue, Aug 25 (3:30 PM)
  • Record & Manage Video (YuJa, Zoom, Camtasia) — Thu, Aug 27 (1:00 PM)

3. AI & Emerging Technologies

Dive deeper into AI’s impact on learning and master advanced prompt protocols:

  • The Worst (AI) Professor — Mon, Aug 17 (11:30 AM)
  • Prompt Engineering 2.0: Reasoning & Logic Strategies — Fri, Aug 21 (9:00 AM)
  • Prompt Justice: Getting AI Agents to Do the Right Thing — Wed, Aug 26 (1:45 PM)
  • How to Ban AI in Your Classroom — Fri, Aug 28 (11:45 AM)

4. Pedagogy, Faculty Development & Wellbeing

Reflect on course design, collaborative feedback, and teaching as a practice:

  • Peer Classroom Observations — Tue, Aug 25 (11:45 AM)
  • Wellness By Course Design — Wed, Aug 26 (10:45 AM)
  • Teagle Funding Opportunities for You — Wed, Aug 26 (12:00 PM)
  • Learning Curve Fellowship — Fri, Aug 28 (8:30 AM)

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New Quizzes: Enhancing Online Assessment in Canvas

Looking to refresh your assessments in Canvas? New Quizzes is the platform’s next-generation tool, designed to make building and delivering quizzes more flexible, interactive, and insightful—and it’s a feature option you can enable right within your course. With new question types like categorization and stimulus-based prompts, plus cleaner workflows and improved analytics, it opens up new possibilities for engaging students and understanding their learning.

If you’re used to Classic Quizzes, you’ll find New Quizzes feels familiar—but with more room to experiment. Classic Quizzes is still a solid, straightforward option, and contains features like anonymous surveys that are still missing in New Quizzes, but New Quizzes is where Canvas is investing for the future. If you’re curious about new ways to design assessments or want deeper insight into student performance, it’s definitely worth turning it on and giving it a try. Contact Brandon Bucy or Helen MacDermott with your New Quizzes questions (or really any of your Canvas questions!).

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Roll Call: Taking Attendance with Canvas

Attention faculty: are you looking for a way to manage attendance in your classes? The Roll Call Attendance tool in Canvas provides instructors with a simple way to track student attendance directly within your course site. With just a few clicks, faculty can mark students as present, absent, or late for each class meeting. The tool automatically records attendance and can calculate a running attendance score that appears in the course gradebook if you choose to use it. Because it is built directly into Canvas, Roll Call Attendance helps streamline record-keeping and makes it easy for you to monitor participation and identify patterns in student attendance throughout the term.

Want to learn more? Need assistance activating Roll Call Attendance in your course? Contact Brandon Bucy today!

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New Zoom YuJa Connector Makes Saving and Sharing your Zoom Recordings Easier!

YuJa and Zoom company logos being added together
 

ITS has just implemented a connector linking our Zoom web conferencing tool with our video capture and media management system, YuJa. Moving forward, all recordings made in Zoom will automatically import into your personal media space within YuJa for storage and sharing.

What does this mean for you? First off, you are no longer limited by the 30-day retention policy for recordings within Zoom. You can feel confident that any recordings made during Zoom meetings will automatically and seamlessly transfer to YuJa for permanent storage and retrieval. In addition, you can take advantage of many features within YuJa to autocaption, edit, clip, and share recordings with individual students, classes, external colleagues, or to the public. If you use the Zoom tool within Canvas to schedule your class Zoom sessions, resulting recordings will even automatically publish to your course channel, making them immediately accessible to your students from within Canvas. 

You can access your imported recordings by navigating to YuJa from your MyApps page or by clicking the YuJa link in any of your Canvas courses. Once in YuJa, look for a folder in your personal media area titled “Zoom Recordings”.

Questions? Want to know more? Contact Brandon Bucy or drop by my office in the Harte Center (Room 117, Lower Level 1 in Leyburn Library).

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How to Add a Faculty Member to a Canvas Course from a Past Term

 It’s definitely possible to add another instructor to a Canvas course that has concluded IF you know this trick:

  1. Go to Settings in the Course Navigation of the past term Canvas course.
  2. In the Course Details tab, change the Participation: dropdown from “Term” to “Course”.
  3. Type tomorrow’s date (or any date in the future) as the End date.
  4. Scroll down and click the “Update Course Details” button on the right.
  5. Go to People in the Course Navigation.
  6. Click on the “+ People” button on the right.
  7. Add the email address of the faculty member you want to add. Choose “Teacher” in the Role dropdown.
  8. Go back to Settings in the Course Navigation.
  9. Change the Participation: dropdown back to “Term”.
  10. Scroll down and click the “Update Course Details” button on the right.
  11. Tah-dah! You did it! Pat yourself on the back.

Need help? Have questions? Contact the ITS Information Desk at 540.458.4357 (HELP), email help@wlu.edu, or stop by the ITS Information Desk on the Main Level of Leyburn Library.

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Images in Canvas aren’t appearing in Safari!?!??

 

Sadly, there is an on-going issue with Safari 13.1 and later versions with displaying images and downloading files. Canvas engineers are currently working on a solution for this issue.

Until Canvas releases a fix, you may avoid errors by disabling cross-site tracking prevention in Safari when using Canvas:

On Mac:

  1. Open Safari.
  2. Go to the Safari menu and select “Preferences…”
  3. Click on Privacy.
  4. Uncheck “Prevent cross-site tracking”:

    Prevent cross-site tracking in Safari on a Mac

On iOS:

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Scroll down the list of headings on the left and choose Safari.
  3. Uncheck “Prevent Cross-Site Tracking” (under Privacy & Security).

If disabling cross-site tracking doesn’t resolve the issue, please try the latest version of Chrome or Firefox. (Stinks, we know.)

Need assistance with Safari or Canvas? Contact the ITS Information Desk at 540.458.4357 (HELP) or email help@wlu.edu.