Archive

Archive for the ‘training’ Category

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Resource Calendaring: How LRC staff can group calendars in Outlook 2010

2011/09/28 1 comment
  1. You can save the currently loaded calendars as a preset or “group” from the ribbon in the calendar view of outlook 2010, like so: menu-calendar-group
  2. The group and its members will be added to your calendar tree, and you can load all members with one click, like so:tree-calendar-group
  3. Then you can create multiple presets which correspond to your typical workflows: E.g. when you do not have to check the availability of equivalent sets of equipment, you may want to have an easy overview of staffing in the LRC:   tree-calendar-group-rrooms staffing
  4. Note that – while we have to load individually the calendars of other mailboxes we own –, calendar groups we create in Outlook are automagically mirrored in OWA
    1. But the calendar names get lost in the process? And: the batch select checkbox is missing. And: only up to 5 calendars can be viewed in OWA simultaneously. And: OWA does not support overlay mode for calendars.): owa-tree-calendar-group
    2. It would be great if calendar groups, with the help of ActiveSync, even worked their way through to mobile devices, but apparently they do not: webos-exchange-calendars
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, e-infrastructure, service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , , ,

LRC Assistant Start of Year Training: The PowerPoint

2011/09/13 Leave a comment
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, training, workshops Tags:

The new way of booking LRC rooms and equipment from Fall 2011: How?

2011/08/31 7 comments
  1. Read here why.
  2. You can book LRC resources like rooms, equipment, even tutor hours:
    1. as
      1. faculty & staff: from [MS-Outlook“(pretty much) whatever version”]:
        1. on the desktop Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010 or Outlook 2011 (preferred option for faculty & staff) – if  you are familiar with Outlook Desktop, it is the recommended tool
        2. or at http://mail.uncc.edu, using Outlook Web Access (OWA) at http://mail.uncc.edu, in most browsers – we, however, decided to focus our training of new users on OWA.
      2. student: in Outlook Live (the only option for students) at Ninermail or http://outlook.com,
    2. through
      1. creating from menu:”new” a “meeting request” owa-menu-new-meeting-request(for details see  How to book an LRC resource)
      2. and adding a resource (or several: temporarily, to compare which one’s availability fits best into your own schedule; permanently, to book multiple items at once, as long as all start/end times are the same)  by clicking on the   “Resources”, like here owa-window-new-meeting-request-resources-marked
        1. all LRC resources names begin with “LRC” and will appear if your search the Global address list (GAL) for “LRC”; all bookable rooms and equipment have been given an email address listed here): owa-meeting-request-scheduling-assistant-address-book-search-global-marked2
        2. e.g. to book the LRC main classroom, send to LRC RoomCOED434 class <LRCRoomCOED434@uncc.edu>
      3. and adding other meeting participants, e.g. co-teachers of your class, or LRC staff if you need more than routine support
        1. If you hold a class in the LRC, to remind students of the new location, teachers could also try and add your class, if you made a convenient group of all students in your class in Outlook.
      4. and, from the “scheduling assistant”, choosing a time when the room/equipment is free (= blank), not blocked (= solid or hatched)  (and all participants), scheduling-assistant-timelines-marked-no-yes
      5. and adding a subject with class number and possibly special instructions: 
        1. if you do not allow self-access students on free seats: *EMPTY ROOM*
        2. if you do not allow tutoring in corners: *NO TUTORING*:
        3. I will ask the LRC assistants (unfortunately we have large gaps in the schedule) and tutors to load and check the lrcroomcoed434@uncc.edu so that tutors can relocate with their students on time.
      6. and sending it  (like email to a person) to the room or equipment
  3. What happens next?
    1. await responses: Read more in What happens after the meeting request.
    2. monitor calendars: you can link into your OWA the calendars of those resources that you use frequently (e.g. a piece of equipment, an LRC classroom or tutor office for the language you study). Read more in View Calendars.
  4. If you need to release the resource, i.e. to free up the room/equipment for others to use – esp. helpful when you have the LRC booked for your entire class, but won’t meet there this week), open the meeting form your calendar and click in the top menu the buttons cancel  series, ”send update” owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-occurance-open-ribbon-cancel (for details see how to cancel a meeting request)
  5. SummaryList of Links:
      1. this intro
      2. list of LRC resources that you can book or check out
      3. request resource meeting
      4. change meeting request
      5. cancel meeting resource
      6. resources in OWA’s Global Address List (GAL)
      7. scheduling assistant, avoiding scheduling conflicts
      8. resource responses
      9. resource calendars for staff, and for students
      10. equipment check-out/in
      11.  why?
  6. For further reading: Microsoft explains Scheduling for Outlook Livein more detail here:
    1. Request a meeting
    2. Use the Schedule Assistant
    3. you can also Create an appointment or Set a Repeating Item
    4. Cancel a (single/recurring) meeting
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Room and Equipment handling using MS-Exchange Resource Mailboxes: To train in Outlook Desktop or in OWA ?

2011/08/30 2 comments
  1. While Outlook desktop is a more powerful calendaring tool than OWA (cf. viewing calendars in overlay mode), we decided to first focus on getting everybody to be functional with meeting requests in OWA, since
    1. faculty will want to use this system from their home computers where the outlook desktop configuration, if it exists at all , is probably even more lacking. Students could, but are not likely to have outlook desktop either
    2. both faculty and students (both for rooms and for equipment) will walk up to the LRC reception desk needing help, and then only OWA is available
    3. it is actually part of both equipment check-out and check-in procedure (if not for rooms, then for equipment) that I am designing that faculty and students open up from OWA (on the web browser that the lab assistant is not using: internet explorer, Firefox, Safari should gives us always 2 options on either operating system) that the meeting that they have made (or if not made, make one on the fly), and that the lab assistant enters a code (generated on the PC at the reception desk) into their appointment and sends the update for them to see them through;
    4. we can also serve as backup on our office computers for the reception desk (unstaffed or understaffed), if clients use OWA
  2. Essentially, it is not a PC Environment anymore (although it could be if our Remote Desktop infrastructure were much stronger).
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, training Tags: , , , ,

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Resource Calendaring: LRC resources in the Global Address List (GAL)

2011/08/30 3 comments
    1. Open the GAL for resources by clicking on “Resources” in a meeting request, like here:owa-window-new-meeting-request-resources-marked
  1. You will find an equivalent of the LRC bookable resources list in Outlook’s/O’WA’s Global Address List.
  2. In the GAL,you can  filter by recipient type: outlook-gal-rooms
    1. the result, in outlook: outlook-gal-room-list
  3. for LRC resources, especially other than rooms, it is easier to filter by name(all LRC resource names start with “LRC”) – the result,
    1. in Outlook:gal-lrc-resources
    2. in OWA you will see the GAL as part of the address book owa-lcr-rooms-GAL
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Resource Calendaring: How to cancel meetings in OWA

2011/08/30 4 comments
    1. View instead a short screencast how to cancel meeting requests in OWA.
    2. Or: You start out with a meeting request conversation like this, showing:
      1. a request send from account LRC help (example)
      2. an accepted meeting response  from the resource (e.g. the room) account
    3. owa-cancel-sent-items-meeeting-request-icon-vs-mail-icon
    4. to cancel that meeting, you can go to your (!) calendar in OWA,
      1. select (click on) the meeting and choose “delete”
        1. either  from the context menu after right-click the meeting
          1. or  from the ribbon after selecting the meeting
        2. if the meeting was repeating/recurring, you will be given the option to
            1. cancel this occurrence
            2. cancel all future occurrences
            3. cancel all occurrences (be CAREFUL not to delete past meetings that have taken place; cancel all future meetings in a series by updating the meeting series end time (leaves past meetings of the series intact))owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-delete-series
    5. you can also just open the meeting and choose from the top menu the “Cancel meeting” button, then press menu button: “Send update”:
      1. owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-occurance-open-ribbon-cancel
        1. Again, for recurring/repeating meetings, you will be asked to confirm what exactly you want to cancel, the individual occurrence or the entire series of meetings:  owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-occurance-open-ribbon-cancel-dialog
      2. You have the opportunity to include an informative note in your update before sending.
      3. owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-occurance-open-ribbon-cancel2
    6. After the cancellation has gone through, this is how the results will look like in the e-paper trail:
      1. “sent items” owa-cancel-sent-items-meeeting-request-icon-vs-mail-icon
      2. a cancelled meeting conversation in your “inbox” in “conversation view”: owa-cancel-conversation-views-meeting-request-icons-accepted-declined-canceled-icon
      3. Here is a complete icon legend: 

        4. owa-cancel-conversation-views-meeting-request-icons-accepted-declined-canceled-icon-marked

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, Screencasts, service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Resource Calendaring: How staff view resource “Calendars from your organization” in OWA

2011/08/30 6 comments
  1. Note: Students that have not been specifically invited to share a calendar, must use (staff may also) this approach to view calendars, to avoid a permission problem .
  2. Staff can load resource calendars, but as somebody who books the resource (except where you still cannot book/schedule/sign up: Tutors), you normally neither need nor want to (unless you manage the resources).
    1. To preview the free/busy schedule of the resource, use the scheduling assistant instead.
    2. To make sure that you have booked the resource, load your OWN calendar instead: Since it is you who “meets” with the resource, your meeting will be reflected on there. If you also loaded the resource’s calendar, you would see your “meeting” twice. A meeting always appears in the calendar of all “participants” – only that, other than for resource calendars, you normally do not view the calendar of the other participants who are “human resources”(or maybe you are, at least in the scheduling assistant, but not with details beyond “busy”).meeting-request-view-in-calendar-both-personal&resource_thumb_thumb
    3. You may want to load the resource calendar to learn details about the other “meetings”of the resource (e.g.  which conflicting meeting organizer you can contact in an emergency, or to know how many tentative meeting requests are already pending for a tutor). Below is how:
  3. Similarly to in Outlook (desktop): outlook-mycalendars-shared-calendars-open, in OWA, click on the lower left “Calendar-icon” calendar-iconto unfold the “My Calendars” list my-calendar-icon  in the left pane, then right-click on “My Calendars”, choose “Add Calendar”owa-mycalendars-add1 .
  4. put (part of) the name, click “ok”owa-mycalendars-add2
  5. if there are multiple matches, select the correct one (you can only select one at a time)owa-mycalendars-add3
  6. press “OK” again: owa-mycalendars-add5-search.
  7. As explained above, there is little reason to go overboard and add too many calendars, unless you have to manage: lrc-calendars-outlook
  8. However, you can also easily remove calendars, through the context menu item “Remove shared calendar” owa-mycalendars-add9-remove
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Sanako Study 1200 Workshop Fall 2011

2011/08/18 Leave a comment

Those who wanted to, but did not make it to the vendor training by Sanako’s David Golden (who gave us a basic orientation displaying functions of teacher screen and student screen and demonstrated basic activity functions and what happens at the student screen), might want to have a look at the unedited screencast footage (for Windows Media Player on Windows, if necessary, resort to LRC) I recorded during the entire 2 1/4-hour session:

  1. the first one recording the screen of a sample student station
    1. with an explanation of the student player at the beginning,
  2. the second one recording the screen of the teacher computer
    1. have a look at the end around 2:10:00 where we connect a group of students via screensharing and audio (headsets), so that a group, dispersed across the classroom, can orally collaborate on an MS-Word document  that one student types into but all students see.
    2. The Sanako features used for this are from the dropdown: activity: discussion, and from the button: pc control:model student. Both can be combined with each other, and with a third feature, the capability to subdivide the class in multiple groups.
    3. This application I found useful when, before reviewing materials with one half of the class, I sent my more advanced learners off to a more independent and applied group writing task. I allows any member of the class to join the advanced group,  no matter where they are located. It also forces the group members to communicate  all the target language aurally to the model student. Finally, it affords them access (though not individually) to the language learning tools of a computer while working on their tasks
Categories: all-languages, e-languages, Screencasts, training, workshops Tags: