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All People > Gregory Beyrer > Greg's Canvas Blog > 2017 > September

I work with an instructor who has her students take pictures of themselves doing course activities, and she wants to share those pictures with the rest of her class. Without a learning management system, she would create a PowerPoint presentation and show it during class. Since she started teaching that class online, she would love to put those images online in a rotating slideshow that appears inside her course home page.


Google Slides has options for auto-advance and looping presentations using easily created embed code, so it is a natural choice to use for this purpose.

In the embedded video I demonstrate the following:

  1. Clicking the File menu in Google Slides and selecting Publish to the web...
  2. Selecting and then copying the Embed options for an auto-advance and looping slide show.
  3. Editing a page in Canvas and paste the embed code into the Insert/Embed media dialog box.

I find this works pretty well. The Google Slides presentation does not have to be shared, and the viewer cannot copy or download the presentation unless it is shared. New slides can be added at any time to the Google Slides presentation without needing to upload new files or change the embed code. Since PowerPoint files import directly into Google Drive, using extant presentations is easy. However, the slideshow controls do appear so the viewer could arbitrarily advance to the next slide, see the speaker notes, etc. That opens up the possibilities to add notes to students about each slide or image that could be used for all kinds of possibilities.


EDIT: This post (and video) updated to reflect the easily visible Insert/embed media button.

Our instructors use the cross-listing tool to put multiple classes into the same Canvas course. One has a group activity where her students who pick the same topic work together to submit a group assignment. Since she has cross-listed two face-to-face courses, she wanted to know what would happen if she used the Canvas groups tool, allowed self-select, and also limited the groups to students in the same section. That way she could count on all students in a group being present during that part of the class meeting set aside for group time.


In our exploration we discovered that any student can join any group, and the first student to join a group locks that group so that the members must be enrolled the same section. To discourage all groups being locked by students in the same section, she will include the meeting pattern as part of the group name (e.g., "M/W Cardio Systems Project") and encourage students to join a group that matches when they attend class. In addition, she will turn off the self-select option and then manually move students if they joined a group with the incorrect meeting pattern.


In the embedded video I demonstrate how to create a group set that has the options for self-select but is limited to the same section. I also show a student user joining a self-select group and what happens when a student from another section in that course views the list of self-select groups. Students from other sections can see who is enrolled in a group even if they cannot join it.