Tag: educational technology

Google Tasks to the Rescue!

I’ve switched all of my tasks over to Google Tasks and everything is already better. Things are starting to get really busy preparing for FA20 and I was feeling stressed out and behind. Having all my tasks somewhere I can manage them definitely helps with my stress levels.

Now I can access/edit my tasks from my laptop, mobile devices, etc. Before, I was using MS Outlook Tasks and that was horrible. I would continually having syncing errors and lost a lot of content after a recent sync. Office365 has been a real disappointment in general. Before that, I was very happy with Apple Reminders, but was very disappointed that when they updated Reminders with Catalina, I lost the ability to access/edit my tasks via online iCloud and non-Catalina machines (not including mobile devices).

I was going to move all my tasks to Smartsheet, but looking through a spreadsheet for your tasks is a horrible experience and while it can handle this kind of data, it’s definitely not the best tool for task management for me.

Google Tasks isn’t as detailed as Outlook and that’s better for me actually. I’m going to keep track of how well it helps me, but so far so good!

Looks like I can even export my tasks using Google Tasks Desktop. I hope that works because that wasn’t something I could do with Outlook or Apple Reminders.

Canvas Roster Export for CATME

I just became aware that I’ll need to update our PSU CATME Site.

There are a few videos that need to be either removed or replaced.

I’m more concerned about the next task which is updating our information to assist users with exporting Group membership information from Canvas. I could have sworn that the Canvas Export Grades feature included Group information, but I may be wrong since there is a Canvas Community post that addresses this.

At the bottom of the comments is a post by Lucy Bamwo with a creative workaround:

Currently, there is no way of exporting groups out of Canvas. However, you could set up a group assignment (assign marks to whole group) 0 point, non-submission assignment, place in 0% weighting group and make sure that it has no due date and the grade posting policy is set to manual. You can then score the group with a number in speedgrader and then export the csv from the gradebook. You will then be able to sort them into groups by the group score given.

I didn’t see that information until after I requested Brian Daigle from our Production Team to create a script that would pull the Group information using the Canvas API. I found this information and attempted to apply it to our needs, but didn’t have success. I reached out to Brian because I know he has experience using the Canvas API. In a couple of hours, he had a working Python script that I helped to fine tune to match the input parameters that CATME looks for. While this approach is the most effective solution we have so far, it does require the user to be able to use Python and have the related Canvas module installed.