Storify: #OU_LMS16 - The Life of a Hashtag

Before the Canvas decision was even announced, Mark Morvant and others from CTE and IT were leading town halls on campus about the LMS options, and Mark designated #OU_LMS16 as the hashtag to use for that, and I've been creating Storify collections every week to track the use of the hashtag, and I've been using it myself.

As you'll see, I'm pretty much the only person using the hashtag, ha ha, but I hope that will change as the rollout advances. Even with just one user, though, the hashtag stream is useful! I follow everybody I can find at OU (OU people and OU programs), and I add the #OU_LMS16 hashtag to relevant tweets. I hope to start following some more Canvas people and also people institutions this summer in order to learn more.

Here are all the Storify collections I've made so far, and you can find future collections at my Digital Teaching blog.

#OU_LMS16: 09. May 22 2016
#OU_LMS16: 08. May 14 2016
#OU_LMS16: 07. May 7 2016
#OU_LMS16: 06. April 30 2016
#OU_LMS16: 05. April 23 2016
#OU_LMS16: 04. April 17 2016
#OU_LMS16: 03. April 10 2016
#OU_LMS16: 02. April 2 2016
#OU_LMS16: 01. March 26 2016

Tech Tip: Storify in Canvas

It's easy to embed a Storify presentation in Canvas! When you are looking at a Storify presentation at the Storify website, you will see the option to "embed" in the upper right-hand corner; when you click on that option, you will see a dialogue window that lets you configure the embedding code. Click on Show Templates to see the three main options: story, grid, slideshow.

Copy and paste the code you see there into the HTML view of any Canvas page; that's all!

The Three Options

You can embed all three options in Canvas, although be careful with the grid option. Not all the content types appear in the grid view, but if you are using Storify mostly to to share videos, the grid view is a great way to see a lot of videos to choose from on one page.

To demonstrate how the live Storify presentations work in Canvas, I created a new Storify: Learning about Growth Mindset.

I've embedded that presentation using the three different templates in my Canvas course so you can see the pluses and minuses of each view. Take a look at the see what you think

Story view: This fills the width of the screen, and users scroll down to see the contents of the presentation.

Grid view: This is a good view for images and video, but it is not good for other types of content that you can include in Storify presentations.

Slideshow view: In this view, you see only one item at a time, paging through item by item.

I've embedded the slideshow view here so you can see what it looks like:

Tech Tip: About Storify

Storify.com is a great free tool that you can use for curating content, collecting items from Twitter (that is how it is most commonly used) along with content from Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google+, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, plus other web sources.

You the search tool to find and select what you include in your presentation, and then the presentation can be viewed at the Storify site, or embedded in a webpage. See an example below, along with more Growth Mindset Storify presentations.

Live content in Canvas. You can also continue to edit a Storify after it is done, so if someone visits the Storify site or looks at an embedded presentation, they will see the latest version with the fresh content that you added... and Storify works great embedded in Canvas (see Canvas.MythFolklore.net). So, for example, if you wanted to keep track of a "best of" selection of student content, you could create the Storify and edit it daily (or weekly or whenever), and the latest content would appear in your Canvas site... automatically.

Sample Storify presentation, also available at Storify site:

Tech Tips: Storify Index

Here are the Storify posts so far:

About Storify

Storify in Canvas

#OU_LMS16 - The Life of a Hashtag