Messages to Faculty, Messages to the Community

Educational Technologies for Spring 2023 Teaching

January 10, 2023

Dear Faculty,

Welcome back! As we start a new semester, please take a few minutes to review some important announcements and reminders about the educational technologies available to you.

If you require technical support with Canvas, you may email canvas-help@georgetown.edu. Any generalized tech questions, including issues with MyAccess, Zoom, NetID, may be addressed to help@georgetown.edu. And if you need help with technology before or during a class session, please contact Classroom Educational Technology Services (CETS) cets@georgetown.edu. Please see below for teaching and learning support options via CNDLS, available at cndls@georgetown.edu.

Best wishes for the semester.

The Canvas Support Team

Ken Mayer, Director of Educational Technologies, UIS

Molly Chehak, Director of Digital Learning Pedagogy, CNDLS

Need help? 

For help with any of the issues below or other ed tech questions, please reach out to CNDLS for support with effective and practical teaching techniques ranging from pedagogical choices to implementing technology tools. For quick help, “Ring our Doorbell” and a CNDLS staff member will reach out to schedule a consultation within the hour. Or, you may wish to join a Teaching Circle or attend one of our digital learning webinars this spring. More information at cndls.georgetown.edu.

Canvas Updates

  • Starting in January, Canvas courses will ‘end’ a year after the course begins and transition to ‘past’ courses. While these past courses will disappear from your Canvas Dashboard, you will still be able to access these courses. This change will help clarify and simplify how you can find and access courses but will not affect your daily operations. See our support page for details around what to expect and where past and future courses will be displayed in Canvas.
  • Check out the list of tools installed in Canvas! Do you want to use a tool that’s not on the list or in the Canvas app center? Submit the Google form linked here and we’ll work with you to make it available. The speed of Georgetown’s security reviews and testing depend on whether the vendors cooperate and respond quickly, but expect at least six weeks as a minimum for tools to be approved and installed.
  • The Rich Content Editor (RCE) now supports drag and drop (and copy/paste) : You can copy paste or drag drop an image, audio, video, and document files from the web or your computer into the RCE in Canvas. Files that are added this way to the RCE automatically upload to your course Files area. When dragging and dropping an image from the web, an HTML IMG tag referencing the file at its location on the web is automatically inserted into the RCE. See our guide to learn more about the RCE.
  • Schedule Page Publication: Instructors can delay pages for publication on a specific date and time. This option allows instructors to prepare and schedule pages in advance to automatically publish in a course. The option will appear at the bottom of the page when creating or editing an unpublished ‘Page’ in your Canvas course.

Multimedia Technologies

Are you interested in adding multimedia resources to your courses? Here’s how instructors can present media resources and how you can task students with creating or annotating many forms of media:

  • Panopto — Can be used to upload and annotate video clips, as well as add dynamic quizzes to course recordings. Zoom course recordings are automatically available in Panopto as well, and have better privacy settings.
  • ShareStream – Can be used to stream most audio and video assets owned by the university libraries and from other sources. Reach out to the Library’s electronic reserves program for more info.
  • VoiceThread — This online platform for conversations in Canvas can be used by instructors and students to create and annotate multimedia presentations.

Adobe Acrobat Pro 

Georgetown University has recently signed an Enterprise License Agreement with Adobe. These licenses are available for all faculty, staff and AAPs with teaching or business responsibilities that require Acrobat Pro. Please contact the UIS Help Desk to request a license.

If your position requires a Creative Cloud Suite product, please do not purchase licenses independently. Instead, please contact the UIS Help Desk at help@georgetown.edu with the following information in order to request access:

  • Email Subject Line: Adobe Creative Cloud License Request
  • Information to include in the body of your email message: (Name; NetID; Title; Campus affiliation (Main Campus, Medical Center, Law Center, or University Services); Role type (Faculty or Staff/AAP); Brief justification for requested license.

Classroom Technology Contacts

Georgetown schools and campuses have the following separate points of contact for classroom technology needs: