Life Writing Tutorial: Watch me write at 1x WITHOUT generative A.I.

Writing is challenging for many people.  With the wide availability of generative A.I. tools today, it can be very tempting for people, especially students, to take short-cuts when they are required to write.  While some students have access to private writing tutors and college writing centres, other learners do not share such privileges.  I hope this video will help you understand how to approach your academic writing so you will be able to write and think for yourself instead of relying on computers to do this for you. 

I made this video to help students see some of the invisible thought processes that underlie writing.  While some types of writing can be evaluated for correctness, here I wanted to talk through all the decisions I make, even when I’m writing something relatively simple.  I use a writing prompt from The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/learning/over-1000-writing-prompts-for-students.html).

Create a Word Template with Automatic Date and Time (PC/Windows + Apple/Mac)

If you've ever had to waste time with repetitively typing out the same information over and over again, templates can help you by establishing a head-start for any specific type of document. This video demonstrates how to incorporate the date and time automatically within a template on both PC/Windows and Apple/Mac. After you create your template, double-clicking the file will create a fresh document that already incorporates the details you previously saved.

Print Handouts From PowerPoint (PC/Windows + Apple/Mac)

College and university students should rarely print all of their lecture slides on individual pages. In most cases, printing three slides to each page with blank lines for hand-written notes is a better option. Don't forget to print on both sides of every page to save paper and ink, which actually permits you to print 6 slides per piece of paper.

How to Email Your Professor

Even though colleges and universities use email pervasively, many students are never taught how to write an email. This video breaks down the elements of email messages and gives some tips to enhance their clarity. Templates for accommodations, absence, references and lost items are given, which students can modify to suit their personal situations.

Formatting Addresses in Excel Worksheets

Using Excel to keep track of addresses is fairly common, and the error that I demonstrate near the beginning of this video is likewise common. However, I also demonstrate how you can easily avoid this error. Once you know how to format addresses properly on separate lines within the same cell, you will be surprised at how many of your future colleagues you will be able to impress with this "trick", which is just a line break.

Using the Sort and Filter Commands in Excel

When you work with large amounts of data in Excel, it can be difficult to find the bits and pieces that are relevant to you at any specific moment. This video demonstrates these commands in a basic example that involves only 11 people, so it would be easy to visually inspect all of this data at once regardless of how it is organized. However, imagine how these techniques would be useful if you needed to find only some records in a dataset of 1,100 or 11,000 people.

Formatting and Printing Worksheets in Excel

The "Normal" interface in Excel differs from the standard "Print Layout" view in Word. Word uses a WYSIWYG interface (this stands for "what you see is what you get", and it is pronounced "wizzy-wig"), but as I emphasized in Excel Basics Part 2, what you see in Excel is not always what you get. You normally know what a Word document would look like on paper even before you print it, but you might be unsure of which portion of your worksheet would appear on each piece of paper when you print an Excel worksheet. Learning how to format and print worksheets is an important skill that will save you from wasting time and paper if you find yourself using Excel on a regular basis in the future.

Excel Basics Part 3 - Tutorial for Beginners

Topics in this video:

• "Merge and centre" quickly combines cells and centres their content

• Print preview shows how the current worksheet would appear if it were printed on paper Borders

• "Styles" quickly format data

• "Conditional formatting" changes the appearance of cells depending on their values

• Inserting rows and columns

• "Freeze panes" locks in labels for categories to make reading data easier

Excel Basics Part 2 - Tutorial for Beginners

Topics in this video:

• What you see is NOT always what you get: appearance and reality within Excel

• "Wrap text" causes all of the text in a cell to appear by increasing the height of its row

• Resizing rows and columns

• Alignment (vertical and horizontal)

• "Increase indent" and "decrease indent"

• Number formats, including adding and removing decimal places

Excel Basics Part 1 - Tutorial for Beginners

Topics in this video:

• The difference between "workbooks" and "worksheets"

• "Cells" that contain "values" are organized by "rows" and "columns" that can be identified with "headings"

• Moving around within the worksheet

• The "name box" and "formula bar"

• Font commands

Read This Before Using the "Class" Template in Microsoft Teams

It's unusually difficult to explain why a Microsoft Team should not necessarily be created as the type labeled "Class" despite using it for highered-- especially when you conduct your course with additional platforms like a discrete LMS.

I use "Other" to simplify the interface for my students because if I were to use "Class" tabs like "Class Notebook", "Assignments" and "Grades" would appear, and these could only confuse my students since my content is in Brightspace ("eCentennial" at my college).

These additional tabs are tricky (or impossible) to hide. (I gave up on my Google research on the topic.) Whether or not these appear for you might depend on how your O365 IT admins have configured Teams for your institution.

Why do I bother to set up a Team? I feel it's more convenient for live video classes compared to the option I have through Brightspace (Virtual Classroom/YouSeeU/Bongo), and the chat function on Teams -- especially how it works on mobile -- is superlative. On Teams, it's also easy to combine groups of students that may be "uncombinable" in Brightspace owing to their having been enrolled in sections that pertain to different course codes for administrative reasons (i.e., same course in different programs). 

How to Compare Documents in Word 2019

This video demonstrates how the procedure for comparing two documents:

1. Review tab

2. Compare command

3. Select original document on left

4. Select revised document on right

Introduction to Track Changes in Word 2019

This video demonstrates the basic procedure for using Track Changes.

To enable track changes:

1. Review tab

2. Tracking group

3. Track Changes command

To review changes:

1. Review tab

2. Changes group

3. Next

4. Accept or Reject

How to Generate an Index Using Word 2019

This video demonstrates the procedure for creating an index in Word 2019.

To create index entries:

1. Highlight word or phrase

2. References tab

3. Index group

4. Mark entry

5. Mark all

To generate the index:

1. Place insertion point where you would like the index to appear

2. References tab

3. Index group

4. Insert index

Introduction to Using Styles in Word 2019

This video demonstrates how to use the quick styles in Word 2019 to improve the formatting of your documents. Once you have applied styles, you can use the features in the design tab to change the overall look of your document easily. Styles are important because they interact with other parts of the software, such as creating a table of contents, and styles also improve the accessibility of electronic documents for people who use certain types of assistive technologies.

SnarkyMarky, an Astronomically Popular TikTok Star, Wants You to Check Your Email Every Day

Despite the explosion of messaging platforms that we have access to through our phones, email persists as an important means of on-the-record communication for professionals. Many students are not used to the professional norms surrounding email, and it wouldn’t surprise me if these are even more strict in the legal industry compared to other lines of work. While I communicate with my students through our learning management system and, since COVID, Microsoft Teams, I still expect my students to read every email I send because I reserve it for important communications whether they relate to the overall class or individual situations.

If you don’t know who SnarkyMarky is ask anyone in your life between the ages of about 13 and 23. In just about a year he’s gained a following of almost 4 MILLION TikTokers, and I’m sure his presence on the Internet will continue to grow throughout the future. Pivoting to remote instruction has required me to rethink all aspects of my courses, and commissioning a Cameo from SnarkyMarky is one of the ways I hope to grab my students’ attention early on in the semester. I know most adults are baffled by TikTok’s popularity, but I’m sure many of my students over the next coming years will excited to hear from SnarkyMarky at the beginning of my courses.

Three Ways to Create Horizontal Lines in Word 2019

Horizontal lines can help you separate your document into sections that are visually distinct. This video demonstrates how to create horizontal lines using keyboard shortcuts ( --- , === or *** ) as well as using the borders and shapes commands.

Using Tabs to Format a Letter in Modified Block Style

This video demonstrates how to set tab stops to format a business letter in modified block style. In this style, the dateline, complimentary closing and signature all begin at the horizontal centre of the page. One should always avoid using an excessive number of spaces to achieve a similar outcome because the position of words could change if the font size is increased or decreased.

Creating Vertical Space in Word Documents

This video explains the difference between line spacing and paragraph spacing in Word. It also demonstrates the value of using soft returns (instead of hard returns) for formatting addresses in business correspondence. Inexperienced Word users who do not properly manipulate paragraph spacing within their documents may inadvertently create problems for themselves as the continue to work on the same file.

Change the units of measurement from centimetres to inches in Word (Mac version)

To change the settings for units of measurement in Word for Mac click "Word" (at the to-left) beside the Apple logo, Preferences, General and then choose inches or centimetres