Microsoft always wants to be helpful, so it integrated its Teams meeting feature with Outlook’s calendar, making it easy to schedule them together — too easy. And once an Outlook meeting has a Teams meeting attached, there’s no way to cancel the Teams meeting separately. You have to cancel the whole thing and start over. And your would-be attendees get to deal with all the invitations and cancellations.

So, how many times have you scheduled a Teams meeting as part of an Outlook appointment by mistake? For the first few months of the integration, the answer for me was: “every time!”

How do we stop the madness? Tell Outlook that you don’t want it to add Teams to meetings automatically. That way you can always choose to add Teams when it’s appropriate.

(Do you mostly schedule Teams meetings now anyway, so you don’t want to lose that automation? Further below, we’ll explore the point in the scheduling process that the automation kicks in, so you can leave it enabled but turn it off for individual meetings before it’s too late.)

Tell Outlook Not to Add Teams to Your Meetings Automatically

Outlook Desktop

1. Open the File menu.
2. Near the bottom right corner, click the Options item.
3. On the left-side menu of options, click the Calendar item.
4. Under “Calendar options”, next to “Add online meeting to all meetings”, click the Add Meeting Provider… button.
   
5. Click the Add online meeting to all meetings checkbox until the box is empty.
6. Click the OK button to enact the change.
7. Click the OK button to dismiss the “Outlook Options” dialog.

From now on, scheduling a meeting won’t automatically schedule a Teams meeting for it. But you can always tell Outlook that you want a Teams meeting. Clicking the Teams Meeting button on an appointment window’s ribbon will add the Teams details to the body of the invitation.

Outlook 365

1. Click the Settings icon near the top right corner. (It looks like a gear.)
   
2. In the Search Outlook settings box, type “events”.
   
3. Click Events you create, which should be the first item in the search results.
4. When the “Settings” dialog opens, the main (right-hand) panel should be showing “Events and Invitations”. Under “Events you create”, click the Add online meeting to all meetings checkbox until the box is empty.
5. Click the Save button to enact the change.
6. Click the X button in the top left corner of the “Settings” dialog to dismiss it.

From now on, scheduling a meeting won’t automatically schedule a Teams meeting for it. But you can always tell Outlook that you want a Teams meeting. Clicking the Teams meeting switch (on the right side of the “Location” line), so that the indicator moves from left to right and lights up, will cause a Teams meeting to be scheduled when the appointment is saved.

Stop Outlook from Adding Teams to a New Meeting

Suppose you actually schedule Teams meetings most of the time, so you don’t want to turn off that automation. How do you avoid getting snagged by it for the occasional face-to-face meeting?

The trick is to know when during the process of scheduling the meeting in Outlook that the automation kicks in, so that you can interrupt it. The window for interruption opens the moment you let Outlook know that an appointment is a meeting by specifying an attendee to invite. The window closes when you send the invitation.

Outlook Desktop

In the desktop version of Outlook, fields for inviting attendees don’t show unless you click the Invite Attendees button. If you still have the Teams automation enabled, clicking that button will also poise Outlook to schedule a Teams meeting.

To prevent it from doing so, find and click the Don’t Host Online button on the ribbon — before you send the invitation.

Outlook 365

In Outlook 365, the field for inviting required attendees always shows, but the options for Teams don’t appear unless you actually put a name in the field. If you still have the Teams automation enabled, putting a name in the required attendees field will also poise Outlook to schedule a Teams meeting.

To prevent it from doing so, find and click the Teams meeting switch (on the right side of the “Location” line) so that the indicator dims and moves from right to left — before you send the invitation.

Some of you may read the title of this post and say to yourselves, “That’s easy!” because it used to be. But changes to the Canvas “rich content editor” have rendered this impossible without this one weird trick.

1. In the RCE, open the Insert menu, hover or arrow to the Image sub-menu, and select the Course Images option. (This assumes you’ve already uploaded the image. If you haven’t, select the Upload Image option for this step, take care of that first.)
2. In the Add panel, find and select the image.
3. Dismiss the Add panel.
4. Select the image in the RCE.
5. Click the Image Options pop-up button.
6. On the Image Options panel, switch Display Options from Embed Image to Display Text Link (Opens in a new tab).
7. Click the Done button to dismiss the Image Options panel. Your formerly embedded image has been replaced by a text link to the image.
8. In the RCE, place your insertion point between two of the characters in the text link.
9. Repeat Steps 1-3! (But be sure to choose Course Images in Step 1, because you’ve definitely uploaded it already.) This will embed the image inside the text link.
10. In the RCE, place your insertion point after the last character on the right side of the image and use the Backspace key to remove all the characters on the right side of the image.
11. Place your insertion point after the last character on the left side of the image and use the Backspace key to remove all the characters on the left side of the image. Now all that’s left in the link is the image.

A similar process will allow you to use an image as a link to anything. Just do whatever you need to do to create a text link to what you want, instead of steps 1-7, above. Then use steps 8-11 to get the image into the link and take out the text.

Please review your student course rosters in both Canvas and the My JCCC portal.  The My JCCC list is the most accurate and will be used for attendance reporting for your course.

Please reach out to the Technical Support Center techsupport@jccc.edu to report any discrepancies between your official My JCCC course roster and Canvas.

Canvas Course Events and Calendar

If you have completed a course copy from a past semester your course materials may have also copied past calendar dates from Zoom meetings.  These calendar dates might appear in the Syllabus tool and cause confusion for your students.  It is important to delete these old events that may also include links to old Zoom meetings.  Contact the Ed Tech Center edtech@jccc.edu for assistance.

The beginning of the semester is just a few weeks away so begin now to plan for getting your students off to a great start!

First impressions are always important for what students will see when they access your course for the first time.  We have included some links below that provide some guidelines on what to consider including in your Canvas course.  The selection of the Canvas Homepage under “Getting Started Page” is probably the most important first step.

• Canvas Course Guidelines – First day of the semester
• Canvas Course Checklist – Plans for entire semester
• Canvas Resources – List of guides and available in the Ed Tech Center

Feel  free to reach out to the Educational Technology Center with any questions or assistance.