audience-is-teachers | Thomas' Work Space

How to make changes to a meeting request to update/alter a reservation

2012/01/10 plagwitz 2 comments

You can easily release a reservation of an LRC room or resources, completely or partially (e.g. some of the time when you return an item earlier than anticipated), from your calendar in OWA/NINERMAIL:
By opening the meeting request
1. In (staff:)OWA,
2. go to your calendar
3. find and open your meeting
4. make changes to the meeting, e.g. start and end time
5. click “Send Update”
6. (students:)NINERMAIL: looks like you have to cancel the meeting and recreate it with new times. This may change once we get the calendars used by students set up to autoaccept.
More conveniently, without opening:
1. right-click on and choose delete the appointment (if necessary, the system is smart enough to ask you whether you want to delete an entire series of appointments or only this occurrence; on cancelling, see also here).
2. Or to release the reservation partially (= reduce the time), drag the upper or lower margin to the new desired start or end time.
3. If you are working with a meeting request (which by definition has more than the organizer as participants, unlike appointments you make for yourself on your calendar; be wary of making changes to meeting requests which you are not the organizer of (= you did not initially create the meeting request)), the system offers you – and should should accept – to notify the other participants automatically.
4. Which in this case is not a person, but only (unless other people have been included in the resource booking which can be done) a resource mailbox which, if configured to autoaccept, may still respond to you like so, in this case with an acceptance, since you can not cause a conflict when releasing a resource that had been reserved for you):
6. This also only affects the occurrence you are currently working with, as you can see from the stricken-out recurrence icon that results:
7. This flexibility is one of the main reasons (= better resource utilization) why we introduced this system: so that users who want to visit the LRC with their class/borrow a resource on short (often happens, depending on pedagogy, with a couple off days or less ) notice don’t have to be turned away with no good reason.
8. Just do not try updating from the publically viewable web calendars, those are for “view”-ing only, including by students:

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers Tags: 2007, 2010, 2011, calendaring, live@edu, ms-exchange, outlook, outlook-live, scheduling

Transcribe sounds into Arabic letters on the web using Yamli

2012/01/06 plagwitz Leave a comment

How do you compare this to Microsoft Maren and Google Arabic keyboard input?

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Arabic, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, Intermediate, mental-notes, Uncategorized, websites, Writing Tags: yamli

Calendaring: How to view all your Moodle course assignments in Ninermail, OWA or MS-Outlook – Shortest

2012/01/05 plagwitz 3 comments

Start in Moodle here, then do steps –1 to 2. Open NINERMAIL, continue with steps 1 to 8:

Want a longer step-by-step?

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, lms, Screenshots, step-by-step-guides Tags: calendaring, FAQs, moodle, ms-outlook, OWA

Sharing and reusing Moodle learning content using backup and restore, part III: Shared intermediate courses

2012/01/03 plagwitz 1 comment

You can facilitate the sharing process if you link source and destination Moodle courses via a Moodle course that is itself shared between the teachers (= all teachers can backup from or restore/import into this shared course), but not to students.
By backing up to and restoring from such a shared Moodle course, you can more easily inspect the shared course content than
1. if you’d import into the destination course to inspect,
2. or either inspect the unzipped XML of the Moodle course backed-up content format, like here:
  2. which can be a daunting perspective on your content:
  4. A little more instructive are the Moodle course export file columns in a handy list, with sample content (where available in our case – sample content does not represent an actual “row”, but merges multiple “rows”, using Excel’s “Paste Special’/ “Skip blanks”):
  5. As you can see, there are fewer than 254 column (meaning you can even load this into Excel <2007), and apparently you get to actual teaching content already on nesting level 3.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-infrastructure, lms, service-is-learning-materials-creation, Spreadsheets Tags: moodle

Meeting Requests in OWA – from the source

2011/12/22 plagwitz 1 comment

The Scheduling Assistant

Add or Remove Attendees

Select a Meeting Room

Reply To or Forward a Meeting Request

And more: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/bb899488.aspx

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-infrastructure, service-is-library Tags: 2007, 2010, 2011, calendaring, FAQs, live@edu, ms-exchange, outlook, outlook-live, resources

Language tutoring support in the LRC

2011/12/20 plagwitz Leave a comment

New and improved as of Spring 2012: We now have 2 computerized small group work spaces for tutoring groups.
An effective computerized help desk
A live CAE tutor calendar display. This will help the time zone-challenged students until all students are put into the right time zone in NINERMAIL (or self-help). At that point all students will be able to load the tutor calendar of their choice in NINERMAIL. The tutor calendar has also “LRC” in the title – this way students always are reminded WHERE the tutoring is. We are also working on getting small group workspaces set up in the entrance library area to the left.
Improved tutor signage
A variety of non-computerized tutoring workspaces
A variety of computerized tutoring workspaces that allow the tutoring to share with other uses of the LRC.
As listed in this view when you enter the LRC:

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, service-is-tutoring Tags: calendaring, NINERMAIL

Sharing and reusing Moodle learning content using backup and restore, part I: Backup

2011/12/15 plagwitz 4 comments

To reuse your own content, you can import. To use somebody else’s content, the other user can backup his content (even though not shown below, a subset of the content of a course can be chosen) and share (by downloading the file created within the course file area) the backup file with you (a zip-archive that contains an xml file), for the other user to restore. Like so: