R-MC Faculty Teaching Toolkit: Student Collaboration

Student Collaborations

This page introduces these student collaboration tools in Canvas:

• Canvas "Groups": Managing course groups and providing an area ("Pages")  that affords the students in a group to work individually or collaboratively, and to view each other's work.
• Canvas "Collaborations": leveraging Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the students in a group to collaborate on documents.
• OneNote Integration in Canvas: collaborative note-taking among group members.
• Hypothes.is: social reading and collaborative annotation, allowing the instructor and students in the class to share and respond to each other's comments.

 Canvas "Groups"

The Instructor creates and accesses student groups inside the Canvas course. The student can access his/her groups either from the global navigation  or from a course site. The "Groups" feature allows the students in a group to see and edit each other's work. The Instructor can view, edit and delete all groups' work. This feature works well if a class activity or project is expected to be developed by group members individually and then combined as a group. Note that the instructor cannot grade individual or group work simply by setting up Groups. Grading is possible through Group Assignments and Group Discussions.

"Groups" Overview for Instructor and Students

Related Topics for Instructor:

• How do I automatically create student groups?
• How do I manually create student groups?
• How do I assign an assignment to a course group?
• How do I assign a graded discussion to a course group?

Related Topics for Students:

• How do I edit a Canvas page in a group?
• How do I work with the Canvas page editor?

Canvas "Collaborations" tool (in the course Navigation)

Using Office 365 for student collaboration on Word, Excel and PowerPoint

• Activate "External Collaborations Tool" in the Canvas course
• Install the Office 365 App
• Set up a collaborative project for students to get started.

Tutorial in text

Related topics:

• Creating MS Office 365 Collaboration in Canvas
• Automatically creating student groups
• Manually creating student groups
• Office 365 in Canvas: Assignments, Collaborations, Modules and Pages

OneNote by Microsoft

Microsoft OneNote is a digital notebook tool. It can be integrated into your Canvas course, or used as a stand-alone application. OneNote is part of R-MC Office 365, and can be accessed and managed through the R-MC intranet. All documents and collaborative work in OneNote are automatically saved and sync'ed in one’s R-MC OneDrive. (Note: It has been reported that sometimes there is a system delay in saving documents in OneNote. Student collaborations on OneNote may not be saved or sync'ed in a timely manner.)

• Read the article "OneNote Class Notebook: A Digital Binder that Will Change the Way you Teach"
• Microsoft resources: OneNote for Education

Steps to integrate MS OneNote into Canvas:

1) Get a Key and Secret for your Canvas Integration:

     Go to https://www.onenote.com/lti. There you will -

• Sign into OneNote.com using your R-MC username and password
• Select “Register a new LMS”
• Give a name (e.g. your last name, no one will see this information except you) 

     You will be given a Key and Secret. You can use this registration (Key and Secret) for all your R-MC Canvas courses, across semesters. 

2) Set up the integration in your Canvas course. The Integration appears as “Class Notebook” in the course Navigation.

Using "Class Notebook" in Canvas

• Microsoft resources on Class Notebook
• Adding and Managing Class Notebook: Video tutorial (not specific to R-MC Canvas)
• The instructor may set up collaboration groups through the Canvas “People” link. The groups are carried over into the "Collaboration Space" in Class Notebook feature.

Related topics:

• Automatically creating student groups
• Manually creating student groups

 Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is is a tool that encourages social reading, collaborative annotation and discussions around texts (PDFs and public webpages). It is integrated into our Canvas LMS. Technical and pedagogical details are on library.rmc.edu/teachingtoolkit/hypothesis.