For Faculty: COVID-19 Instructional Continuity in Spring 2020

All Guilford community members have access to Google Hangouts Meet through their Guilford Google accounts. You can set up virtual class sessions or meetings in advance by creating a Google Calendar event: this automatically creates a Hangouts Meet link that all invited participants can use to join, either by sending out the link or sharing the calendar invite. Using the screen share feature enables virtual presentations. Google has released premium features to all G Suite for Education customers during this move to online learning: you can now record sessions (recordings are saved in Google Drive) and host up to 250 participants.

Canvas Chat lets you have instant message conversations through Canvas: simply enable it by adding it to your course navigation through the Settings page (if it is not already enabled), and from there any user who clicks the Chat option automatically joins the conversation. There is even a chat history log, so students who miss the discussion or want to revisit an answer can catch up on it later.

Guilford now has an institutional license to Zoom, which means that all Guilford community members now have access to it. Log in to Zoom using your Guilford Gmail address and email password. Upon login, faculty and staff are equipped with Pro accounts that allow instructors to create breakout rooms, record sessions to the cloud (with transcription provided by Zoom), share whiteboards, poll students, and more. We have also set up a Zoom Canvas integration.

Create a Canvas Discussion that allows your students to respond to a prompt or to one another. You can have students post their work to receive feedback from peers.

Enrich your lesson plans and open up new ways for your students to collaborate with tips, tricks, and resources for Jamboard (the whiteboard included with Google Drive).

Use Padlet as a digital bulletin board: students can add short text responses and images, and they can comment on each other's posts. This is a great way to get responses to a particular question, and a fun way virtually check in with students and see how they're doing.

Google Docs' Suggestion mode, like Microsoft's Track Changes, allows viewers to make suggestions and edits, as well as add comments, to a piece of writing: you can encourage your students to use it to virtually edit each other's work.

You can use Canvas's Peer Review Assignment feature to allow students to give feedback to one another on their submissions. Peer reviews can be assigned automatically by Canvas, and can be anonymous.