January Teaching Tools Symposium

By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL 

On Tuesday, January 14, 2026, CITAL held our annual Symposium on Teaching Tools. Faculty learned from their colleagues and CITAL staff about some of the best online teaching tools available to enhance student learning and engagement.

There were sessions on four free learning tools that integrate completely with Canvas:

• Sara Gundersen (Economics) presented on Perusall, an interactive platform where faculty can post books, articles, or textbooks for students to collectively and collaboratively comment. If you are struggling to get your students to read assignments before class, Perusall can help by having students start to discuss the text online before they even get to class.  
• Stan Zygmunt (Physics) demonstrated Top Hat, a platform that allows faculty to create a more interactive learning experience for students.  Stan uses Top Hat to pose real-time questions during class so he can tailor his teaching to what students need help with.
• Ed Finn (CITAL) showed faculty some features of IgniteAI, a new tool in Canvas that can create rubrics from your assignments, generate quizzes from reading material, summarize discussions, and more. 
• Betsy Burow-Flak (English) introduced faculty to RATE, a new tool that Valpo is using to help students evaluate and articulate how they are building the competencies that employers want. 

Various Valpo faculty also presented on useful features of Canvas, Valpo’s new learning management platform: 

• Diego Piedra (Music) talked about how he uses Canvas Groups to divide a large class into smaller groups in order to have more meaningful discussions. 
• Natalie Krivas (English) showed us how she saves time in grading by using weighted grades.
• Ed Finn (CITAL) demonstrated how Turn It In, Canvas’s AI detection tool, can also be used by student writers as a Draft Coach. 
• Mike Longan (GeoMet) shared how New Quizzes (Hotspot) can be used to ask students to identify items on a picture, diagram, or map.

Thirty-two faculty and staff attended the Symposium, from such departments as: Psychology, Biology, Business, Social Work, Occupational Therapy, and Library Sciences. 

If you would like to know more about any of these teaching tools, you can either contact the presenter directly or else contact us at CITAL Help.  We would be happy to set up a one-on-one meeting with you either virtually or in person.