Linoit - Sharing without a Login

Time now to consider how to use Linoit effectively and safely in the classroom. Security and safety is a huge consideration for educators, particularly with online tools. There are several methods that teachers can use to effectively use Linoit in the classroom will be taking a look at three different situations. The first instance allows a teacher to create a Linoit account for himself or herself to create canvases, and share those canvases with students without requiring the students to have individual Linoit accounts, so the students can actually access a canvas without logging in without a username or password, and the teacher does not have to go to the trouble to create a bazillion individual student Linoit accounts. All right, in order to accomplish this, we need to be in the my canvas area of Linoit. In this case, we've completed creating a canvas, so we click on the my page icon to get back to our standard menu, and from the my page icon, we'll click on my canvases. Now we get a listing of all the canvases that you've created. And I can click on the preferences link on any particular canvas to change the levels of permission and accessibility. Now, for this particular canvas initially, I set it to be very interactive. Anybody could find it, and post stickies to it. Well, in this case, I want to prevent everyone from seeing my canvas. I only want people to be able to get to the canvas who have the URL. So what I'm simply going to do in the details area here for permission settings, I'm going to uncheck list on public canvases that simply means that my canvas is no longer visible to everyone. The only way you can find my canvas is for me to share the URL with you. So I am going to allow guests to post stickies, but no one will know how to find my canvas because it's not listed in the Linoit public catalog. The only way for you to find my canvas is for me to share the web address with you. Let me save those new settings. I'll go to the canvas, and I want to copy the URL so that I can post it and share it with my students. Now, I'm going to log out to demonstrate to you what it looks like when a student goes to the Internet, enters the URL to a canvas and can access it. Notice no login, no password required, you as the teacher did not have to create a student account. The student didn't have to create a Linux account. Now, when a student accesses Illinois canvas using this method, the student can post a note. And the only drawback to this method is the teacher really can't track who posted that note. Notice every note has an icon in the lower left hand corner. And if the person who created that note was logged in with an account, as I was when I added this note, the username will show up when you mouse over the icon. If the person was able to access the page without logging in, if they simply had the URL to your canvas, notice that the note appears to be posted by guest. This is the only drawback to the method. There is no way for a teacher to track who actually posted the note. Now, as a teacher, you might recommend to your students to include their name when they post a note. But once again, there's no way for me to verify that Sally Adams actually posted that note, so there is a bit of a drawback in using this method. It's up to the individual teacher to determine whether you're willing to give up the ability to monitor and track who posted a note for the ease and convenience of simply sharing the canvas URL without going through creating accounts and requiring logins. So that's method number one.