Want to help your students be prepared for the first day of class but don't want to publish your Canvas course? Use the Course distribution list for your course section in Gmail! All courses get them once they are active in SIS. When you send an email this way any student that is registered for your course at the time will receive your message*! Remember to Blind Carbon Copy your students so that if they reply all the other students will not receive the email. This is the same as checking the box to send an individual message to students in Canvas. 
*This function remains available for 90 days after the semester ends, but you need to add ".completed" to the address. Example: 
Current Student Gmail Group: 
[email protected]

Completed Student Gmail Group (students have been graded in SIS): 
CGC.2021.Spring.BPC.110.21561.completed@cgc.edu

Before I talk about some of the ways in which you can encourage student engagement with videos in your Canvas course, let’s talk just a bit about some video recording options as well.

You all know that I am the biggest advocate ever for free tools, but this week I want to share one of the most-used tools in my arsenal, which did in fact cost me about $30 - TechSmith's SnagIt.

A lot of software companies these days work on a subscription basis, but the $29.99 education price pays for a license, not a periodic subscription fee (you will need to provide proof that you are an educator in order to take advantage of the education pricing).
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I use SnagIt pretty much on a daily basis, for many tasks:

• To create graphs for handouts
• Capturing images, especially for guides and how-to documents
• Editing, resizing, setting transparent backgrounds, image reflections, text overlays, etc.
• Combining images for headers, slides, etc.
• Screencasting (I use it regularly to provide students with video feedback)

This week's post is in response to a question that I received recently about the best hardware to use for recording. Anyone who knows me will be able to guess my response: "It depends!"

This week in LOL, we collectively made our first foray into Webex Breakout Sessions! As this feature has only been "live" for Maricopa Webex Meetings for about 2 weeks, there are still some questions we may not immediately have the answers to - but if you do have questions after watching the video, be sure to use the "LOL Suggestion Box" form to let us know, and we'll try to find the answer(s).

This week was our first ever "LOL... Some Good News Edition." We had live guests AND good news shared via email, conversation about tools, student engagement, instructor presence, creative workspace hacks, and more!
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