A recap of different posts made to support you with writing!

• Tech Tips Blog Post: RefWorks – Simplifies the process of research, collaboration, data organization, and writing by providing an easy-to-use-tool for citation, bibliography, and reference management.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Microsoft’s Editor – An artificial intelligence (AI) powered service that not only reviews your work for you to check for spelling and grammar, but also checks for refinements such as clarity, conciseness, formality, and vocabulary (among others).
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Collections in Edge – A more in-depth and organized way of saving webpages that you frequent often, or want to save to revisit at a later date.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Voice Dictation – Did you know that the majority of people can speak up to three times faster than they can write? Try using voice dictation and see if it saves you time when completing written work!
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Voice Dictation Commands for Editing and Formatting in Office 365 – Specific words or phrases that you can say, that Office applications understand as an action to carry out, rather than text to type. Take voice dictation one step further with voice commands!
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Graphic Organizers in Kurzweil 3000 – help you to organize your thoughts, group ideas together, develop a flow to your paper, or even be repurposed to help you develop a timeline or a plan to help keep you on track.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Graphic Organizers + Voice Dictation  – Combine Graphic Organizers in Kurzweil along with Voice Dictation in Word as a recipe for success to help you organize and write down your thoughts!

Previous posts with different options to support you in notetaking, both during lectures and when reading.

• Tech Tips Blog Post: OneNote – A digital 3-ring binder allowing you to take notes, edit your notes, use Immersive Reader to listen to your notes, add in images and visual content, and more, across all of your courses, throughout your program. 
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Top 8 Tips for OneNote – Are you a OneNote user and want to learn how to quickly take text and convert it into a bullet or numbered list? How to quickly create a table? How to quickly move rows of information up or down in a table? How to link information from one page to another to quickly navigate through your notebook? Or how to organize your notebook with quick shortcuts?
• Tech Tips Blog Post: PDF Files in Edge – How to use Edge to read and take notes on PDFs.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Voice Dictation – Did you know that the majority of people can speak up to three times faster than they can write? Try using voice dictation to dictate what you want written in your notes (outside of class that is). Not only should this help you get those notes written faster, but provide you with another means of interacting with that same information (and the more ways you interact with the same information, the stronger connections you’ll make in your mind to recall that information).

Next up in our round up of supports identified on previous blog posts…

Supports for Reading

• Tech Tips Blog Post: Reading Week – Reading Supports – A special post highlighting some common reading difficulties, and the features that Kurzweil 3000 and Immersive Reader have to support these experiences.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Immersive Reader – A free set of tools developed by Microsoft built into the latest versions of Word, OneNote, Outlook, Teams, and Edge (among other applications).
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Kurzweil 3000 – The main feature of Kurzweil 3000 is text-to-speech, but Kurzweil has so many other features that also help with comprehension, writing and studying.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: PDF Files in Edge – How to use Edge to read and take notes on PDFs.

Over the next few blog posts, we are going to highlight some different technology options, but, those tech options will be for the same support! Why? Well, because not everyone learns the same, and here at Tech Tips: Work Smarter, Not Harder, we also believe that not everyone needs the same supports.

Up first are past blog posts for Task and Time Management – supports to help you to plan and organize, both your time and your efforts.

Supports for Task and Time Management

• Tech Tips Blog Post: Pomodoro Technique & Forest App – The Paa-muh-daw-row Technique structures your time into smaller chunks of work and break periods, with the thought that it is easier to focus for a short period of time, rather than a longer period of time. Forest is an app available for both android and iOS, as well as a web extension, that takes the Pomodoro Technique, and gamifies it! 
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Microsoft To Do – Helps you to conveniently organize your tasks in one place, and access that to-do list from multiple device.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Brightspace Pulse – With the Brightspace Pulse app is that you are able to visually see, across all of your courses, important dates for the week (month, etc…).

This is a very special blog post for two reasons:

1. Our First Tech Tips blog post was almost exactly a year ago (September 9, 2022)!
2. You can sign-up to receive email notifications when new Tech Tips blog posts are added!!

What is Tech Tips: Work Smarter, Not Harder?

Tech Tips: Work Smarter, Not Harder is a blog post with the goal of encouraging the use of technology to make student academic life easier! We highlight different technology resources available for students to use and how those resources might either save time, or provide alternate means of completing a task, which can ultimately make a positive impact on comprehension and even grades!

From time to time we even have our friends from other departments at the College take over the blog to highlight some of the supports they offer students.

We also like recap posts to catch new subscribers up with all of the wonderful posts we’ve done. Like our last post on Tech Supports (and Other Supports) at Red River College Polytechnic!

OH! and we love posts that provide different options for the same support (e.g. different tech for reading supports). Watch for a few of these style posts in the coming weeks!

Overall, Tech Tips: Work Smarter, Not Harder encourages the use of technology to make your academic life easier! …and most often, those technology supports are FREE!

How to Sign-up

Red River College Polytechnic has newsletters you can sign up for to stay informed about the latest news, events and stories about students and alumni.

Red River College Polytechnic – Newsletter Subscriptions
Hint: Tech Tips: Work Smarter, Not Harder is already checked off using the above link, it’s listed under Accessibility Tech Tips. 🙂

Sadly, summer is coming to an end. For many students this means embarking on a new adventure and starting your program here at Red River College Polytechnic, and for others, this means entering into a new school year, a new level, or a new term.

It can be overwhelming (to say the least) going to College, whether straight out of high school, or returning back to school after taking time off.

With that in mind, this blog post is dedicated to pointing out (just some) of the many resources that the College has to offer students. Technology supports, Mental Health supports, Accessibility supports, Indigenous supports, and Counselling supports (just to name a few).

Technology Supports

• Tech Tips: Work Smarter, Not Harder – a blog the encourages the use of technology to make your academic life easier!
• Academic Success Centre – Technology Literacy – a self-directed resource for students looking to learn about and understand how to use College-approved applications such as LEARN, HUB, Webex, MS Teams, and Office 365.
• Academic Success Centre – Tech Peer Tutors – provides individualized help with navigating online courses, or specific College applications.
• Intro to LEARN – this is a course available in LEARN which familiarizes new users with the LEARN platform.
• New Student IT Help Resources – a collection of resources and supports offered by the Information and Technology Solutions (ITS) department at the College.
  • Additional Help Resources from ITS
  • ITS Service Desk – available 8am-5pm Monday-Friday (excluding holidays). 204.632.2125 or servicedesk@rrc.ca
• LEARN Support

Mental Health Supports

• Campus Well-Being at RRC Polytech – provides programs, services and resources to support the holistic health of students, staff and faculty. Opportunities include:
  • Sport and Fitness
  • Recreation and Wellness
  • Mental Well-Being
  • Wellness Blog
• Personal and Supportive Counselling – is available to help students deal with personal concerns that may be affecting your studies or personal well-being. 
• Early Assist – is a system that helps faculty, staff and students identify and reach out to a student who could benefit from these services and help them connect with appropriate support. 

Accessibility Supports

Providing persons with documented disabilities fair and equal access to educational programs, services and facilities. 

• Accommodations
• Assistive Technology
  • Including Technology Supports available to all students
• Alternate Format Materials

Indigenous Supports

Indigenous supports provides the tools and resources to help Indigenous students succeed, from community to classroom to career.

• Advising and Enrolment
• Academic Liaison and Resource Coaches
• Navigating Coaches
• Student Counselling
• Awards, Bursaries and Scholarships
• Student Employment Services
• “R-Crew” (Resources Crew)

Note: the above is just a sampling of the many different supports that the College has.

• A full list of supports can be found at Red River College Polytechnic – Supports
• The Red River College Polytechnic Students’ Association is also a great resource and offers many great events and opportunities for students!
• …and if you want to stay up-to-date with different areas of the College, consider signing up to receive email notifications when new posts are added to our various blogs. Red River College Polytechnic – Newsletter Subscriptions
  Hint: Tech Tips: Work Smarter, Not Harder is already checked off using the above link, it’s listed under Accessibility Tech Tips.

If you have a hard time remembering due dates, or tasks that you need to complete, or even could use some support to break tasks down into more manageable steps, Microsoft To Do may be for you! 😊

What is Microsoft To Do?

Think of Microsoft To Do as a digital to-do list, but, way easier to use and you don’t have to rewrite your to-do list multiple times because it’s messy looking or you can’t fit all your tasks on your to-do list (anyone else have these problems, or is it just me?!). Microsoft To Do helps you to conveniently organize your tasks in one place, and access that to-do list from multiple devices (because I can’t be the only one with a physical post-it note of a to-do list at home, that wishes they had that to-do list with them while out and about?!).

Features of Microsoft To Do

• You can see your tasks across different apps (Teams, Outlook & To Do to name a few)
• See your tasks on different devices (laptop, desktop, mobile)
• Create tasks from Teams messages
• Create tasks from emails in Outlook
• Share your tasks with others (family, coworkers, classmates in a group project)
• Break down large tasks into smaller steps

…and if that doesn’t sound good enough on its own, Microsoft provides you with suggestions to update your daily or weekly to do list!

How to Access Microsoft To Do

Microsoft To Do is available to students for free! This is because as a student at Red River College Polytechnic you have access to Microsoft Office 365 (and Microsoft To Do is included with Microsoft Office 365).

Webpage: Red River College Polytechnic, Microsoft Office

Webpage: Microsoft Support, Welcome to Microsoft To Do         

Webpage: Track and Manage Tasks with Microsoft To Do

Webpage: Microsoft To Do – List Maker, Daily Planner & Task Manager

Webpage: Microsoft Support, My Day and Suggestions in To Do

Maybe you thought we were done promoting Edge… Well guess again! Here is another blog post highlighting a really powerful (and very useful) way to use Edge!

Reading PDF Files in Edge

Now unfortunately when you open a PDF file in Edge, you don’t have full access to the full Immersive Reader toolbox, but you do have access to the Read Aloud tool (that is a part of Immersive Reader). This will allow you to have a PDF file read aloud to you, allowing you to multi-task and listen to your textbook while doing the dishes, it may help improve reading comprehension by allowing you to listen to content not only at your own pace, but many of us retain information more meaningfully when listening rather than reading ourselves. There are also many different natural-sounding voices to choose from, and different accents available!

Notetaking on PDF files in Edge

Yes, you read that right. Let’s talk about how to take notes directly on the PDF in Edge!

• Hand-drawn notes: using a stylus on a touchscreen computer, or a mouse on a non-touchscreen computer, you are able to hand draw notes onto the PDF file (Microsoft refers to this as “inking”). This is a great tool to allow you to underline, circle, or even draw images directly onto your PDF!
• Highlighting: using your mouse (or trackpad), click and drag your cursor over the text you want highlighted (just as you would highlight in a physical textbook). And don’t worry, for those color-coding fans out there, you have 5 different colors to choose from!
• Adding text notes: you can also add text notes with your own typing directly onto the PDF. Think of this feature like a digital post-it note!
• Save your work: don’t forget to save a new file with all of your notes and highlights!

Resources:

• Video: How to draw and Read Aloud on PDFs with Microsoft Edge
• Video: Top 10 Microsoft Edge Features (9 minutes and 27 seconds into this video is a demo of reading and annotating PDF files in Edge)
• Webpage: How to Annotate and Highlight PDFs in Microsoft Edge
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Immersive Reader

Blog human speaking here: Honestly, I was never a fan of using Edge (or Internet Explorer back in the day), but it was my New Year’s “Techolution” to switch. I not only exclusively use Edge now, but I promote the use of Edge to others! I am converted, and let me tell you why…

Why Edge?

1. Immersive Reader is an amazing set of tools that helps with focus and concentration, reads text aloud to you, and allows you to customize your own reading experience by changing text size, background colors, and even translating the text into another language. …and it’s not only free, but already built into Edge!
   • No wonder why we highlighted Immersive Reader in a previous blog post!
     Tech Tips Blog Post: Immersive Reader
2. When copying and pasting a URL from Edge into a document such as Word, OneNote or even an email in Outlook, the link will automatically be formatted with meaningful text! What this means is that the link in your document will give a description of what is on the webpage, rather than typing out the entire URL (nobody wants to read, or listen to, http://www.SuperMegaDeluxeLongWebsiteAddress/192857463/alphabetical.com).
   Improved copy and paste of URLs in Microsoft Edge – Microsoft Support
3. The sidebar feature of Microsoft allows for easy access to tools, apps and more, and is a great feature for multi-tasking.
   Sidebar – Microsoft Support

What are Collections in Edge, and how do I use them?

Here it is, the real “meat and potatoes” (or main reason) of this blog post… Collections in Edge! Collections is a more in-depth and organized way of saving webpages that you frequent often, or want to save to revisit at a later date. For example, you are researching information for a paper you need to write, and want to save a bunch of websites to review later. It is similar to “favoriting” or “bookmarking” a webpage, but goes beyond what those features can do.

With Collections, you can not only save websites to a particular collection, but you can also add notes attached to those websites. For example, add a webpage to a collection, and then add a note indicating why you saved that webpage (“this webpage outlines why Corgi dogs are adorable”).

You can even drag images, links or sections of text directly into a Collection! Saving you from later having to scroll through an entire webpage to find the information you wanted to save. And don’t worry, when you save images or sections of text directly to your Collection, the URL is saved as well so you can revisit the entire page if needed!

…And yet, there is more! Maybe you’re working on a group research project and have saved a bunch of useful information you’d like to share with the rest of the group. You can easily share a single resource from your Collection, or share the entire Collection of resources. You can even export your Collection to Word or Excel!

Resources:

Organize your ideas with Collections in Microsoft Edge – Microsoft Support

Video: How to use Microsoft Edge Collections

Download Edge (for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android):

Webpage: Download Microsoft Edge

Unpaywall

Need help finding good resources when researching? Tired of “hitting a wall” when you find what you think is a good resource, only to find out you need to pay to access it? Unpaywall is a service through the Library and Academic Services department that can help! It is a legal and copyright compliant service that maintains a database of links to full-text articles from Open Access sources. The content is harvested from legal sources including repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves. 
Webpage: Unpaywall, Library and Academic Services at RRC Polytech

Back in my day Microsoft’s Spell check was a basic editing feature that only checked for spelling and grammar. Editing beyond this was done by a human, and most often something you paid for. Then came along software dedicated to editing your work. This software was (is) great, but often has a free and premium plan, with editing beyond Spell Check on the premium (cost) side.

These days, there is Editor. Which is essentially a super-charged version of the previous Spell Check. Editor is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered service that not only reviews your work for you to check for spelling and grammar, but also checks for refinements such as clarity, conciseness, formality, and vocabulary (among others). Did we mention it’s free? Because it is. 🙂

What makes Editor different from Spell Check?

Editor not only alerts you to errors (corrections) but also provides suggestions to enhance your work (refinements). As you work through the Editor toolbar, you’re alerted to your potential error, and provided with options for suggested changes. In the case of spelling errors, you are able to get a definition of the word you typed and the suggestions. You may also hear the potential error and suggested changes aloud to help you determine what is correct.

What are the Basics that Editor Checks for?

• Spelling
• Grammar – including: sentence fragments, missing words, punctuation, capitalization and commonly confused words such as your and you’re (anyone else picture Ross from the TV show Friends saying “y-o-u-r and y-o-u’r-e?!)

Going Above and Beyond with Editor

• Ever find that there are words or abbreviations that are marked as errors, that really are not? Well you can add those words to your custom dictionary so that they are not marked as errors anymore!
  Add or edit words in a spell check dictionary – Microsoft Support
• Want to check spelling or grammar in another language? No problem!
  Check spelling and grammar in a different language – Microsoft Support
• Do you often misspell the same word and are tired of changing it to the correct spelling in the Editor toolbar all of the time? You can add that misspelled word to your AutoCorrect list and have it automatically changed for you in the future!
  Add or remove AutoCorrect entries in Word – Microsoft Support
• Need certain parts of your document not checked? Maybe you type a lot of email addresses, links, abbreviations in uppercase letters, or words that contain both letters and numbers. Well you can select types of spelling errors that Editor checks for.
  Ignore uppercase words, numbers, or Internet addresses when checking spelling – Microsoft Support
• Have you ever reread an email you’ve already sent, only to notice some basic edits you missed? We’ve all been there, BUT you can set Outlook to automatically run Editor before sending an email!
  Check spelling before sending a message – Microsoft Support

Where is Editor Available?

Editor (and the features outlined above) are available in Word and Outlook (both desktop and on the web), and as a browser extension for Edge or Chrome, with a Microsoft 365 subscription. …and remember, as a College student you have access to Microsoft 365 subscription features for FREE!

Additional Resources

Video: LinkedIn Learning: Using Microsoft Editor in Word (by Mike Tholfson)