IMPORTANT: If you are an organizational administrator, it is at this point that you will have to decide whether or not to install Yellowdig organization wide or course-by-course.  If you are an administrator beginning to install Yellowdig for your organization and would like more information regarding this decision, please contact support@yellowdig.com. 

Steps for Integrating Yellowdig with Your LMS

1. Request your LMS Key and Secret from your institution or Yellowdig.  Depending on how your LMS is configured to run within your organization, you may have an "organizational administrator" for Yellowdig to contact for the Key and Secret.  They may also have alternate steps to tell you about compared to what follows.  If you do not have an institutional contact or you do not know the contact at your institution, you can retrieve your Key and Secret by contacting us at support@yellowdig.com.

2. Once you receive your Key and Secret, please follow the steps below as shown. The process is similar for other LTI supported LMSs and specific instructions for the most popular ones can be found here.

3. Go to "Settings" and click on the "+ App" button shown near the top-right of the Canvas window.

4. In the Add App pop-up window, choose "By URL" as your configuration type, and copy-paste this text into the "Config URL" field:

https://www.yellowdig.com/yd-canvas.xml

Fill in the rest of the fields as follows:

5. Click Submit and Yellowdig will be installed for your course! 

6. Decide whether you will be using the automatic grade passback to automatically grade Yellowdig participation OR just want student to have access to Yellowdig for your course without connecting to Yellowdig's point system.  If you want to connect your course to Yellowdig's point system, proceed to "Creating a Graded Assignment" immediately below.

• Note: Each student must click the Assignment link to Yellowdig at least once to enable grade passback. Students are free to use the sidebar link after they've used the Assignment link once, but students must be explicitly instructed to set up grade passback for themselves via the Assignment link.)

Creating a Graded Assignment

1. Navigate to the Assignments page and click the +Assignment button.

2. Name the assignment. ex: "Yellowdig Discussion Assignment"

3. Set the Points. ex: 100

4. Select "External Tool" from the Submission Type drop down menu.

5. Enter https://www.yellowdig.com/lti/launch for the External Tool URL or click Find and select Yellowdig from the list of installed external tools to populate this field.

6. Though not required, because of the size of the Canvas "shell," Yellowdig is typically better experienced in its own window so we suggest that the "Load This Tool In A New Tab" option is checked (below where you enter the URL in the previous step). 

7. Click Save and Publish. 

8. Click the Assignment link that you've just created, which will launch Yellowdig and prompt you to create your board for the class.  Usually it is preferable that the lead instructor or an instructional designer be the first instructor to launch the Yellowdig link because they are made the default "board owner."  Board owners have special user permissions for managing the board.  If necessary, ownership can be easily transferred to another user later by the board owner (change board ownership in Settings -> Basics).  In the board creator you can do things like copy content from old boards or integrate users form an old board into a new one.  Or you can simply create a "fresh" board.  Learn more about the options for creating new boards from this Knowledge Base article.

9. Remember: Make sure that your students click on the Assignment link to Yellowdig at least once to enable grade passback.