Category Archives: ICT Skills

Technology Roadshow to appear at FoHSC enrollment day

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Technology Roadshow April

Tuesday 30th April sees the return of the Technology Roadshow!

After the success of the last event held in the University Library, we are to bring the road show to the Faculty of Health and Social Care to tie in with the Faculty enrollment and induction day for the newest cohorts, but all current students and staff are welcome to come and ask any burning questions you may have about your devices, gadgets or gizmos.

We would be delighted to talk to you about technology; let us demystify some of the things you’ve heard about but don’t know how to use, and let us help you get started using technologies maybe you haven’t heard of yet!

Some of you have said you would like to know how to do such things as:

  • sync my emails?
  • easily log into Learning Edge?
  • get the course notifications I want?
  • download journal articles and eBooks?
  • save shortcuts to the library and my subject pages?
  • watch videos or listen to podcasts?
  • find online journals and articles?
  • build a reference using the Discover More ‘cite’ tool?
  • find useful apps?
  • connect to wi-fi on campus?
  • find a PC to use?
  • forward my Edge Hill emails to a personal account?

Tell us what you want to know about Learning Edge, Campus Pack, Mobile Learn, the PC Availability Finder, Library Anywhere, Ebrary, Collaborate and anything else you want to know about technology to support your learning.

Come along to the Faculty of Health and Social Care; we will be located in the foyer between 11am and 2pm.

If you’re not on campus on the day to speak to us in person, we have got that covered too!  You can contact us during the event (and beyond) via our social media channels: Facebook and Twitter. We’ll be using #EHUmobileclinic so if you have something to say or a question to ask about using technologies for your studies please get in touch.

We look forward to seeing you!

Carol_Chatten2

 

 

Carol Chatten
Learning Technology Development Officer

 

What do you need to do at least once every ninety days…?

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I’m sure there  are many answers to this, however the key thing you need to do every ninety days with your university network account is change or update your password. As some of you are coming up to the dissertation deadlines, or a large number of deadlines all at once the last thing you need to happen as you make your final amendments, is to be locked out of your account.

If your password has reached 90 days, you will be promted by a message in the GO portal as you try to logon, that your password has expired. Please make sure you follow the instructions.  You will need a brand new password and you have to enter twice to confirm. 

Or you would like to change it more regularly and keep the password moe secure you can change it within your settings in the GO portal.

Login via the Go Portal.

  1. Once logged in hover your cursor over your own name in the top right hand corner and click on settings.
  2. You will now have the option to change password via the forth option listed, perhaps unsurprisingly the heading is named password.
  3. The password you select willneed to be a minimum of 8 characters in length – it can be letter and numbers, but it must be different from your last 10 passwords.

N.B. When you change your password you will need to log back in with your new password.

Also you can set yourself a safety net from within the settings page, from the second option listed Settings. From here you can provide an alternative email account e.g. yahoo, gmail, or Hotmail account. This means at any time of the day or night you can reset your password should you get locked out.

Your student number and password allow you to access all of the following:
Your University email account
Your Learning Edge account
Your library account to renew books
Wireless networks on campus
eBooks and eJournals
Eduroam wireless network available in over 900 UK locations listed here www.eduroam.org

If you have any issues logging in or navigating around the GO portal,
you can contact us on:

Tel: 01695 584286

Email: lsdesk@edgehill.ac.uk

 

 

 

 

Spring clean your digital skills

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Staff Development Programme – Developing Digital Excellence

Calling all staff, dust off your keyboard (sorry maybe taking the spring cleaning pun too far..)

Staff from across Learning Services are delivering sessions this month around a number of themes.  There are three sessions from our Digital Practitioner series – maybe you might want to start with the essentials skills in Learning Edge and then follow up with sessions looking at enhancing the online experience for your students using podcasting and also, how you can further support your students in a very positive way by using the tracking tool within Blackboard.

Digital Practitioner

Radio Ga Ga, Host Your Own Podcast

11/04/2013 12.00 – 1.00pm

Learning Edge Essential Skills

18/04/2013 10.00 – 11.30am

Big Brother Knows: Supportive Online Tracking

26/04/2013 12.00 – 1.00pm

 

Our librarians are here to support your research and information retrieval skills, which includes searching, critical analysis, storing and recording your references and copyright and intellectual property. 

Digital Researcher

Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights for Research

09/04/2013 12.30 – 1.00pm

Advanced RefWorks

11/04/2013 10.00am – 12.00pm

Critical Analysis of Information Sources

15/04/2013 1.00 – 2.00pm

A core component of our Developing Digital Excellence programme is ICT skills.  If you or staff you manage are keen to improve their skills, there is a ECDL induction on the 9th April.  You can come along and meet Elaine Czotter, the ICT staff development trainer who can tell you more about the qualification, our ECDL test centre and the programme she delivers.

Digital Office

ECDL Induction

09/04/2013 10.00 – 11.00am

POWERPOINT 1 – Introduction to On-Screen Presentations

16/04/2012 9.30 – 11.30am

Find out more about the whole programme and future sessions in May and June via the Learning Services wiki

Rachel Bury

Academic Liaison Manager – Quality, Marketing and Communication

Key IT tips

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Avoid extra stress at this time of year by following these hints and tips about safely saving your work.

Two doubles and a single

Double check where you’re saving your work to, don’t just trust in the quick save icon.  You’ve spent a great deal of time and taken great care in creating your work, make sure you’re 100% certain it’s saving where you want it to.

You also need to double save your work. You never know when your old faithful pen drive will give up the ghost so back up your work by saving it to your student drive.

If you always follow the two points above, it should mean you only have to do your piece of work once. Otherwise you could be faced with spending a great deal of time trying to find lost work and still having to re-write an assignment or dissertation.

Email

A good way of making sure you have work available to you wherever you are is to send it to yourself as an attachment via email.  However, before you start working on it you must save it to your pen drive and/or student drive.  If you don’t, your document will go into a temporary file which will most likely be deleted once you log off and power down a university pc.

Three steps to tracking down your files

Try the following ways to find your lost files:

Unexpected power loss or pc shut down? Open up the program you were working in and click ‘File’ then ‘Recent’ (this may automatically open for you).  If your file doesn’t appear then you can click on ‘recover unsaved documents’ from within that screen.

Set the PC to work for you by setting up a search for your file:  Click ‘start’, select ‘computer’ and type some or all of the file name into the search box at the top right hand side of the screen.

Missing work opened from an email?  Check the downloads folder of your pc.

Always here to help

You can find support on using Microsoft Office packages and further general tips here: http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/ls/it-help/guides/

If you are in one of our buildings and cannot locate your document, visit your nearest help desk and our staff will try their best to retrieve and recover your work.

 

Developing Digital Excellence

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Developing Digital Excellence – staff development and training in February

We have got a number of sessions for staff this month – many looking at some of the new ideas in the digital world, such as QR codes, data curation, and an interesting look at how you manage your digital identity.

Sessions are developed by various staff in Learning Services, utilising our skills and knowledge from our academic support librarians, learning technologists, our ICT trainer Elaine Czotter and specially trained staff from our media teams.

Digital Classroom

Sessions w/b 14th and 22nd February
Introduction to classroom equipment and lecture theatre technology
Please contact Glenn Allan direct ex 7227  or glenn.allan@edgehill.ac.uk

Digital Practitioner

12th February 12.00pm – 1.00pm
Learn and interact at the touch of a QR code

28th February 12.00pm – 1.00pm
Avoiding digital disaster in your presentations

Digital Researcher

12th February 12.15pm – 12.45pm
Web 2 and research

14th February 10.00am – 11.30am
Research data curation and sharing

19th February 12.00pm – 1.00pm
Your digital identity as a researcher

Digital Office

12th February 10.00am – 11.30am
Word – Managing paragraphs and page

25th February 2.00pm – 4.00pm
Excel – session 2

All of our training sessions are held in the staff training room, 2nd floor, Learning Innovation Centre.  You can find out more details via the Learning Services wiki, and you can book your place on line using the online booking link.

Learning Services wiki
https://go.edgehill.ac.uk/wiki/display/ls/Staff+Development

Student Top Tips: Mobile Learn & Learning Edge customisation!

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Over the past month in LTD we have focused our attention to the eLearning survey in relation to the main student queries related to the Learning Edge.  This has given me the opportunity to assemble some information on certain areas of feedback received.  Two of the main areas that caught my attention was the request for a mobile app to gain access to Blackboard and consideration for more options to customise the way you can view your course list within Learning Edge.

One of the main questions that kept reappearing from students was the request for “a tablet/smartphone app to access Learning Edge”?

This is something that has been available since the beginning of this academic year. The app is called Blackboard Mobile Learn and can be downloaded from your device’s (iPhone, iPod, iPad, Blackberry, Android) local app store.

Learning Edge isn’t optimised for mobile use, so using the Mobile Learn app will display Blackboard in a different but more mobile-friendly way; the picture below shows how it looks on different devices:

 

The app will give you access to your Blackboard course dashboard, announcements, assignments, grades, discussions and handouts. You’ll also be able to contribute to and comment on discussion and blog posts, and create new discussion threads. You can even set your notifications within Blackboard to be sent to your mobile app. This means anytime there is activity within your course (for example a new announcement or grade released) you’ll be notified, meaning you’ll always be up to date with what’s happening in your course.

You can find installation guides and helpful FAQs about Mobile Learn here -

Apple users click here
Android users click here
Blackberry users click here
Setting your Mobile Learn course notifications

 

Learning Edge Customisation?

Another question that you’ve asked is “can I manage the display of courses listed on the ‘My Institution’ tab?” 

Yes, you can edit the display of courses and other information to make your view a lot clearer.

Just select the small ‘cog’ icon in the top right hand corner of the ‘My Courses’ module and select or deselect the options you wish to see/not see.

If you don’t want to edit the way your course list are displayed but you want to find your course a lot quicker you could even just try searching for the course. Hold down the ‘Ctrl’ key and press ‘F’ on your keyboard and you will get a ‘Find’ box pop up within your browser. Type the module code or part of the course ID and select ‘Next’ to find that text on the current page.
For further information on customisation, please refer to this guide LTD quick guide.

 

Mark Wilcock

Learning Technologist

ICT saving you time on frequent tasks

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We all want to make good use of the technology we have in the University and our ICT staff development workshops are built on improving efficiency with everyday tasks.

This blog will introduce you to some ‘time saving’ features and provides links to ‘quick reference cards’.

GroupWise Mail

Many of us often send out the same email message at different times, so why not use a GroupWise template file for these frequent messages? GroupWise will allow you to create a template file with the message content you frequently use and then you call up the file each time you wish to use it.

Microsoft Word Table of Contents and document Navigation

When you are working with a large document or report, Word provides a feature that will build an automatic table of contents.  This is based on using Styles which are a collection of text and paragraph formats and which you can modify for your own use.

Using Styles on your headings will also allow you to use the navigation pane to move swiftly through a large document to update and add content.

Microsoft Excel Multiple Worksheets

If you need to view more than one worksheet in an Excel workbook, you can use the New Window feature to view different worksheets at the same time. This is useful when comparing data across worksheets.

Photo Album with Microsoft PowerPoint

Have you photographed your students on a project, task or other event and wish to use the photographs in a presentation? Try the Photo Album command to insert multiple pictures.

Screenshot (2010): this feature is available to Excel, Word and PowerPoint

When you wish to use an image of something on your computer, the Screenshot feature allows you to capture the full screen or part of it with the Screen Clipping feature.

These and other features are reviewed more fully at our individual ICT workshops where you will get ‘hands on’ experience of using them.

Please see details of the following workshops and book an event at the staff development wiki

  • GroupWise Email
  • Word 3 Advanced Features of Word Processing
  • Excel 2 Functions and Worksheet Management
  • PowerPoint 2 Enhancing your On Screen Presentations

Elaine Czotter, ICT Staff Development  Extension 4214                                    

Enhancing your On-Screen PowerPoint Presentations – February 6th 2012

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We are always striving to deliver interesting presentations to engage with our students and colleagues, so this workshop will give you ideas to improve your PowerPoint slide shows.

Using audio and visual objects in a presentation makes for a more interesting ‘watch’ but more importantly ensures your audience will remember the message. You can also use objects you have already developed.

Mixing both text and graphics we will be looking at customising slide shows for different audiences and building in links to other objects. We will also consider best practice in the production of PowerPoint slides.

‘Death by PowerPoint’ – No not here!

To book a place on this workshop, please register at the Staff Development WIKI

PowerPoint Logo

A Digital Choice – Reading eBooks on or offline

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EBooks are becoming more common place in every day life.  Every day we read documents, information and more on our PCs but what about when you want to study or relax with a digital book from the library, away from your monitor?

We have the answer! eBooks are now able to be downloaded from the library on a ‘digital loan’!  You can loan the book for up to 2 weeks and after that time, you don’t have to return it – that’s all taken care of for you!

Come along on 22nd February to find out more about how to download eBooks to your portable device such as an iPad, tablet or smart device or even simply your laptop whilst also discussing how to advertise this useful tool to your students – especially when they are fast approaching one of the most reading intensive times of the academic year!

The session runs from 1pm to 2pm in the LiNC Development Room (top floor) on 22nd February

Book through the Staff Development wiki:
https://go.edgehill.ac.uk/wiki/display/hr/Emerging+Technologies+-+Downloading+eBooks+for+loan

Emerging Technologies Staff Development Monday 21 November 2011 – The Right Image For Blackboard

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Want to learn how to make your images more accessible?

By optimising them you are creating a resource which is both less demanding on Blackboard and eShare storage and also more usable by your intended audience.

Image optimisation is using the most compressed (smallest file size) which remains visually acceptable for the specific role of the image.

This session aims to demonstrate some simple techniques to optimise images using Microsoft programmes.

Book on to this session by emailing Staff Development.

staffdevelopment@edgehill.ac.uk