Some of the technology we’ve highlighted on the Tech Tips: Work Smarter, Not Harder blog didn’t fit into the previous summary posts, but we wanted to make sure our new subscribers were aware of these amazing supports!

• Tech Tips Blog Post: Technology Literacy – Is a self-directed tutorial designed for students that provides basic skill development for using College-approved applications, including LEARN, HUB, Webex, MS Teams, and Office 365. 
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Tech Peer Tutors – Help you familiarize yourself with a specific College application and help you gain the basic-foundational tech literacy skills you need to be successful online.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Accessibility Features of WebEx – Inclusion and accessibility features of WebEx that you can enable yourself.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Captions & Subtitles in PowerPoint – Add real time captions in either the language you are presenting in, or translated into another language.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Speaker Coach – Allows you to record yourself presenting, and provides feedback and suggestions on a variety of elements.
• Tech Tips Blog Post: Visual Ergonomics – Different setting, features, and suggestions to potentially reduce headaches and eyestrain from computer use.

…and speaking of other supports, don’t forget to check out our very special blog post highlighting some of the supports available through the various departments at the College (Counselling, Accessibility, Indigenous, etc…) – Tech Tips Blog Post: Tech Supports (and Other Supports) at Red River College Polytechnic

Hands up if you’re finding it difficult to organize yourself?! We’ve all been there, but there are supports that can help you!

• 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: 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…).
• 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: Microsoft To Do – Helps you to conveniently organize your tasks in one place, and access that to-do list from multiple device.

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