What began as an email to staff at my school has become something that I look forward to each week.  I love to investigate new resources for those that teach and for those not necessarily in a classroom.  I hope that you can find things here that you can use!

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Hey.  Are you getting assignments from students in Word Pad or they are telling you that it doesn’t look right?

 

It might be related to how you are loading the lesson in Canvas.  Remember, students do not have access to the desktop versions of Office products on their laptops.  They only have the online versions.

 

If your assignment looks like this:

 

Or some version of this, then you’re students can’t access it AS A WORD document on their laptop. 

They will click on it.  It will download and they will click it again.  When they do this, it will default to WordPad because they don’t have Microsoft Word.

 

If you want to give them documents this way, you need to remind them of the following steps:

1.  Click to download, but DO NOT open.

2.  Open Office365 in a new tab.

3.  Open your OneDrive and go to the proper class.

4.  Click “Upload” à “New document”

5.  Click into your Downloads folder to find the file that you just downloaded and then upload it to your OneDrive.

6.  Now you can edit it in Word.

 

That’s a lot of extra steps…you can avoid all of that by remembering to create you assignments as an “Office365 Cloud Assignment.”

1.  Create a new assignment.

2.  Type any directions that you want in the box at the top.

3.  Submission Type à External Tool à Find à Office365 Cloud Assignment

4.  Select the file that you want students to have à Attach File

5.  Click “Select”

6.  Finish adding points, due date, etc. 

7.  When you click “Save” you will see your document in the window.

 

Now, students can edit the document from their own OneDrive with a simple click of “Edit Document.”