Yes, you read that title right, today we’re here to show you some fun features of Microsoft Word!

Fun Feature #1 – Focus Mode

“Focus” is a mode built into Word that removes all of the ribbons and toolbars, and leaves you with a clean view of your document. This mode can be helpful when needing to read your document, but you don’t want to get caught up in formatting your document. You can find the Focus Mode in the “View” tab, then in the “Immersive” section. …or, you can find it by using the next Fun Feature!

Fun Feature #2 – Microsoft Search

Now, this one isn’t just for Word, because at the top of all Microsoft 365 applications, you’ll find a handy search box. Not only does this search box help you to locate information within your document, but also helps you to search for additional information – for example, are you looking for the part of your document where you wrote about how fabulous Dalmatian Dogs are? Well Microsoft Search will not only find that part of your document for you, but also allow you to search the internet for more information and pictures. Plus you can find commands or features for that application, find people you may want to share your document with, or find other related documents!
Microsoft Support: Find what you need with search in Microsoft 365 apps

Fun Feature #3 – Keyboard Shortcuts

You may be familiar with some of the common keyboard shortcuts such as ctrl+c (copy), ctrl+v (paste), but did you know there are keyboard shortcuts for opening/saving documents, formatting your document, and for how you view your document? Well there are! Below is a table of commonly used keyboard shortcuts in Word (but heads up, there are more and you might see this topic pop up again in a future blog post!).

For example, want to (very quickly) take the text in your current document and place it in a new document? Ctrl+A – Ctrl+C – Ctrl+N – Ctrl+V – DONE!
Microsoft Support: Commonly Used Keyboard Shortcuts in Word

Fun Feature #4 – Quick Parts

Do you find you are often typing the same information in multiple documents? For example, your contact information (like an email signature), program information (course code, instructor, etc…), or maybe even a topic and description of what you are writing about. No matter what type of text, you can add that text to “Quick Parts” in Word so that the next time you need to enter that text, you can select it from the Quick Parts section and have it automatically entered into your document!
LinkedIn Learning: Add commonly used text automatically

Reminder:

As a Red River College Polytechnic student, you have access to the latest version of Office 365, including Word, and to LinkedIn learning!

• Webpage: Red River College Polytechnic, Microsoft Office
• To access LinkedIn Learning, click on the LinkedIn Learning icon in HUB and use your College ID and password

Having access to your course materials on your computer is great! But, for some of us, that means that we are accessing our course materials on the biggest source of distraction we own.

Today’s blog post is here to highlight some of the different features built into Windows that may help reduce some of those distractions.

Minimize Visual Distractions in Windows

1. Turn off background images, animations and more by personalizing your Windows display
2. Personalize your toolbar – remove unnecessary and distracting apps
3. Turn off “Live Tiles” (a feature that shows you personalized updates for what’s happening in your world – aka a feature that shows you possible distractions)
4. Use “Focus Assist” to personalize which notifications pop-up on your screen and create periods of time with little to no distractions
5. Use the tools in Immersive Reader to reduce visual distractions and help you focus on what you’re reading

Note: how to access each of these features changes whether you are using Windows 10 or Windows 11. Please check out the following link for details on these features and how to access them.
Make it easier to focus on tasks – Microsoft Support

Bonus suggestion: if your computer is used for both school and personal, it might be a good idea for you to create two separate profiles on your computer. Create one account for you, and an account for school. In your school account, do not save your passwords for any distracting sites (social media, online shopping, etc…). For those of us who can’t remember our passwords and depend on them being saved or stored (in a secure way), this extra step we’d have to take can sometimes stop us from visiting those distracting sites.
Add or remove accounts on your PC – Microsoft Support

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.