Creating Spaces for Students to Share Videos & Media

One of the advantages of working online is that the modality provides students the space and time to develop and share presentations asynchronously. No more taking up the last three classes before the final while students fumble with thumb drives or struggle to get their files uploaded. Of course, students can also share presentations during your Zoom class meeting times, but it is worth considering  if it wouldn't be more effective for them to develop their presentations to be viewed and commented upon asynchronously (or viewed asynchronously and commented upon synchronously).

Although many students may already know the tools they would prefer to use for presentations, we suggest a number below that might be useful (and one that might not be). Below the list of tools, we offer some ideas for how to best share presentations.

 

PRESENTATION TOOLS FOR STUDENTS - SOME IDEAS


Voiceover Presentations

Presentation Tool icons For voiceover presentations CDLI has developed a  Presentation Tools page that recommends the best software options for presentations and provides some guides. You can copy and paste this information into your course or provide a link to it. (The page also cautions students to not simply narrate a PowerPoint unless they are doing so in Office 365 and using the recording tab. We see a lot of frustration around PowerPoints that won’t play when shared.)

Other Presentation Tools

The Presentation Tools page is geared toward voiceover presentations, but if you are open to other forms of presentation, you could direct students to the following:

There are any number of other presentation and content creation tools that your students may be familiar with--like Prezi, OBS, or Twitch. As long as students can get an embed code and share it in Canvas, those tools should work. Rather than mandating the use of a specific tool or software, it is sometimes better to have students use what they are familiar with and like. However, it is important that you emphasize they test the software out first to ensure they can share it in Canvas before they invest too much time.

 

PROVIDING SPACE FOR STUDENTS TO SHARE PRESENTATIONS


Canvas Discussion

Probably the easiest way for students to share their presentations and get feedback is to use the Canvas Discussion tool since students can embed most anything into Discussions with an embed code. Of course, if they are using Studio, they can simply click on the Studio icon in the toolbar and browse their Studio library for the video to insert. The instructions below show how to embed media in a Canvas discussion:

To embed media into a Canvas discussion post, begin by copying your embed code. Next, click on Reply in the discussion and when the editing window opens, click on the (1) Insert/edit media icon in the toolbar. Once that opens, click on (2) Embed and (3) paste your embed code in the box. Click (4) OK to save.

Student guide for embedding presentations

Canvas Editable Pages

Depending on the number of students in your course, another option is to create a Presentations module and add editable functionality for each page. This has the advantage of the presentations being less scrunched than in a discussion, but makes it harder for students to leave direct feedback around the presentation (unless student presentations are all in Studio, in which case they could be set up with the time-stamped comments option checked. See the Time-Stamped Video Discussions page for more information.)

To make a Canvas page editable, use the Options menu below the text editor to give both Teachers and Student editing privileges:

Make page editable instructions

The resulting Module would look something like this:

Presentations Module

Padlet

Padlet is another possibility for sharing presentations. Check out the Ideas for Using Padlet in Your Course and How to Get Padlet Pro and Set It Up Right pages for some ideas.