Author: Sarah Rusnak

Shared calendars in Outlook

| Sarah Rusnak

When reserving spaces in Atwell Hall, it’s helpful to view the shared calendars to see when space is available. These calendars live on the medical center side of Office365, which means you’ll need to login to your medical center email account to view them.  If you do not typically use your med center email, start in your browser at mail365.osumc.edu

Adding a shared calendar via Outlook on the web

Adding a shared calendar via the Outlook desktop application

Calendars for spaces in Atwell

  • HRS Atwell ADL Lab
  • HRS Atwell FRS
  • HRS Atwell Lobby
  • HRS Atwell SIM Lab
  • HRS Conference Room 116
  • HRS Conference Room 123
  • HRS Conference Room 130
  • HRS MD Kitchen

Adding alternative text

| Sarah Rusnak

Alternative text or alt text is important to include so that learners who use screen readers can fully engage with content. There are several ways to add alt text, depending on what website you are using or content you are creating. In general, start with right clicking the image or graphic and look for the option to Edit Alt Text or to edit Properties. Here are specific guides:

The Web Accessibility Initiative provides an alt text decision tree if you need help deciding whether an image needs and description, and what to include.  Note also that in many programs it is possible to mark an image as decorative so that screen readers will skip the image.  Though, if an image does not convey any meaning to the learner, consider whether it should be included at all.

And if you’d like a master class in writing alt text that conveys meaning, check out We Rate Dogs (@dog_rates) on Twitter.

Top tips for students

| Sarah Rusnak

Collage of images meant to invoke studying- an open laptop with pen and notepad appears on the left. On the right there are smartphones, an iPad, and part of a keyboard and mouse. Overlaying the image are the words "tech tips"

Saving, organizing, and using citations

Literature searches and the libraries

Stay connected

  • The university is moving to a new wireless network called eduroam. Start at wireless.osu.edu on any personal device to configure the settings.

Creating digital media

Still have questions?  Check out peer tech tutoring, available to all students

ZoteroBib

| Sarah Rusnak

ZoteroBib is a free resource you can use to quickly and easily create accurate citations. There’s nothing to install, and very little to learn. You may have found other sites that offer similar features, but ZoteroBib stands apart for several very good reasons.  From their FAQ section:

We created ZoteroBib because we thought there should be a bibliography tool that was free, easier and faster to use, and much more accurate.

Unlike other tools, ZoteroBib doesn’t bombard you with ads or try to charge you (or your school) money for full functionality or additional citation styles. And since it’s built by the team behind Zotero and backed by the same open-source community, you can count on the same expertise and attention to detail that people rely on when they write dissertations and scholarly papers in Zotero.

Even though I’ve been using the full featured Zotero software for over a decade, I still find ZoteroBib handy for quickly formatting a few citations.

ZoteroBib

Too long; didn’t watch

  • ZoteroBib is a free, easy to use website for formatting citations
  • Be sure to export or copy/paste! This page will not save your citations after you close the browser.

Tech tutoring for students

| Sarah Rusnak
Students have access to a wealth of software and tools at Ohio State, though they may not know it, or may not know how to fully use these tools. Consider including the following in the instructions for your assignments:

Student mentors are available through the university’s Digital Flagship program. These are peers who can help with any of the following topics:

  • Building a presentation
  • Building a webpage or blog
  • Collaborating on projects
  • Getting started with technology
  • Managing notifications
  • Producing a podcast
  • Producing a video
  • Storing and sharing files
  • Taking notes and staying organized
  • Using CarmenCanvas

Schedule Tech Tutoring

To set up a tech tutoring session, log into OnCourse and click ‘Schedule Appointment.’​

  1. For type of appointment, select ‘Academic Discovery and Success’
  2. For type of assistance, select ‘Service’ and under the Tech Tutoring section, select the service you need help with.
  3. Pick a date (it can be today!)
  4. Select ‘Find Available Time’ to find a time that a Student Mentor is available to help you.

Your appointment will happen over CarmenZoom. You will get a Zoom link with your appointment confirmation email.

Extending time on quizzes and exams

| Sarah Rusnak

If you’ve received notice from the university’s Student Life Disabilities Service Office that one or more of your students requires extended time on quizzes and exams, there’s a function for that in CarmenCanvas. The ability to adjust the testing window per student is under Moderate Quiz, though that option only appears after you have published the quiz.

Before you publish the quiz, make sure the quiz has the Available From and Available Until dates that you want. By setting these dates, students cannot access the quiz early even though you’ve published it.

Screen shot of the bottom of the edit quiz page, showing the box for setting due dates, available from date, and available until date.

 

Once published, you’ll have the option to Moderate This Quiz appear on the far right when you select the quiz. Note, it is not under Edit, it’s just off to the side on the right.

Screen shot of a published quiz. The option to moderate the quiz appears on the far right side.

 

On the moderate page, you’ll see a list of all enrolled students. Select the pencil icon for the student who needs extra time, and add the additional time in the dialogue box that appears. Note, you just need to add the additional time. In this example all students get 25 minutes, so I’ll add 13 minutes for a 1.5x extension.

Dialogue box that appears when editing extensions for one student. The options are to add additional attempts or to add additional time.

One other note- if your restrict the quiz for all students to only be available from 8AM until 8:25AM on the same day, that restriction will override the extension you’re adding now, and that student will be shut out at 8:25AM without their extra time (ask me how I know 🙃).

Recommended resources

 

Accessibility checker in CarmenCanvas

| Sarah Rusnak

Too long; didn’t watch

Transcript

As you are editing or creating content in CarmenCanvas, there is a built in accessibility checker that can help you check for things like images that are missing alt text or color contrast that’s actually very hard to read. So this is the page that I’m going to work off of. And if I come in here and click on edit, you can see anywhere in Canvas, anywhere in CarmenCanvas that you have the rich content editor, or this up here which appears at the top of a page it appears at the top of an assignment, a discussion, a quiz. Anywhere you see this, you should also have the accessibility checker just below the content itself.

So there’s a two here which lets me know there are two issues on this page that need to be fixed. So if I click on the accessibility checker, it’s going to pop up and tell me what the issue is. It highlights the image in question and says, Hey, this image, the only alt text is the file name, which is not descriptive. So I can change that. I can come in here and I can, for the sake of time, choose the text that I already wrote and put in a description here. This has multiple uses by changing the alt text. Here’s another one that has the file name which doesn’t tell anyone using a screen reader why this image is here or what it’s telling them, or why it matters. So it helps those who are using screen readers, but it also helps those who are having trouble with their internet connection or the image doesn’t load for some reason.

And so now it says, great, no issues were detected. I get balloons and confetti, I can click save. There are no longer accessibility issues. And what’s tricky about this is you don’t see anything different. For a sighted user, the alt text does not appear and that’s fine. That’s as it should be. But for users of screen readers now, it would say “image: screenshot of the page that results from using the undelete function in CarmenCanvas”, which is better. I could probably do better than that, but that’s better than nothing. Or if someone has a really slow internet connection. Or if Canvas is only half working, or who knows what and the image just doesn’t appear, the alt text will display in its place and that tells a sighted user what was supposed to be there and the purpose that it served. So alt text actually helps everybody. In the case of the internet going out or even if it is working, it’s good to have. So good to know. The accessibility checker is there and it will guide you through the changes you need to make.

Revision history in Carmen Pages

| Sarah Rusnak

Too long; didn’t watch

  • Click the three dots to the right of Edit on any page to restore a previous version of a page.

Transcript

If ever you make a change to a page in CarmenCanvas and then decide that that is not what you meant to do, there is a revision history where you can go back and revert to a previous version of a page. To the best of my knowledge, this only works on Pages, not on Assignments or Quizzes or Discussions, which is regrettable, but at least it does exist on pages. So I actually want to revert this page. I did, I did another oops. So if you come up here to these three dots just to the right of the edit button, you’ll see View Page History. I’m going to say, you know what? I want to go back to what I did 20 minutes ago because that was better. And so I’ll click on that and I can see the difference in the page. You probably can’t tell, but I know what I did. And then click on Restore this version and it’ll say, “Are you sure?” Yeah, I am sure. And so now I’m back to an earlier version of the page. But notice if you change your mind again, I could switch it back to where it was 30 seconds ago. So it’s a great tool for basically having a version history or a save as of the page that you are building.

Meet anytime option in Zoom

| Sarah Rusnak

When creating a recurring meeting, Zoom includes a Meet anytime option when you select a recurrence with No Fixed Time. This is an excellent option if you’d like to host office hours or a class session multiple times, but you do not want to see every instance of a recurring meeting in your upcoming meetings list when you login to Zoom.

Why bother with this, when you could just use your personal meeting room?  By hosting a separate recurring meeting for each task or class, you can set different permissions for participants on each call. If you are using Zoom during class, you can also set your Echo360 account to automatically copy all recordings from Zoom, and if they are organized by recurring meeting, you can map Zoom recordings to be organized by class in Echo360.

Whatever your reason, here’s how to create a recurring meeting with No Fixed Time.

  • Sign in to CarmenZoom.
  • In the navigation menu on the left, click Meetings.
  • Click Schedule a Meeting.

Carmen Zoom Meetings page with an arrow pointing to the Schedule a Meeting button

  • Below the Time Zone option, select the check box next to Recurring meeting.
  • Edit the recurrence. Select No Fixed Time option in the Recurrence drop-down menu.

Carmen Zoom schedule a meeting dialogue box with an arrow pointing to the recurring meeting check box. The resulting dropdown is displayed which includes the recurrence options for Daily, Weekly, Monthly, No Fixed Time

  • Click Save.

Carmen Zoom Schedule Meeting dialogue box with an arrow pointing to the Save button.

Accessing OSU Teams when you’re at OSUWMC

| Sarah Rusnak

Too long; didn’t watch

Transcript

To work as part of a university team and you are a College of Medicine or medical center user, you’ll need to be added to that team as a guest. So the first step is that the team owner for the OSU team must add you to the team using your medical center email address. Once they’ve done that, you will receive an invitation to the team. It will look something like this that you see here. And with that, you’ll be able to go into Teams. and now up in this top right corner, you can see it’s got my medical center ID, the same image as appears on my badge, and says The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. And if I click here, you’ll see I have two accounts I can now toggle between the med center account and the university guest account.

As I click here on the guest account, you’ll notice as it loads that I don’t actually have any teams for which I am a guest, but I do have some missed activity here. There are some things in the chat that I didn’t know happened. So another thing you can do, that’s how to toggle back and forth is click up here and choose which account you want to see, but other things you can do to help make sure you’re receiving those notifications from the teams for which you are part of. If you come up here and click these three dots you can go to settings and within settings I would suggest going to accounts. You should have both accounts listed here and then if you click these three dots notice, you could also use this to switch accounts. But what I want you to look at is notifications.

If for some reason you have notifications turned off for your guest account, then it’s very easy to miss messages or miss mentions on those university teams. So I would check and make sure that your notifications are turned on for your guest account, and then you can also have Teams notify you in different ways. So if you navigate over to the notifications section, I have set my Teams to email me any time I miss activity as soon as possible. If you click this drop down, you can see you can have notifications set to every hour or once a day. But what this will do is send you an email that basically lets you know you’ve missed something in Teams and you need to go into Teams and see what that was. So with my accounts set so that both accounts are receiving notifications and with my notifications set to email me as soon as possible if I’m not currently logged into Teams, that has helped me stay on top of things.

Another thing you can do if you would like to have your medical center Teams up and working at the same time that you also have your university Teams up and working, you can run two instances of teams by running one in the desktop application, which is what you see here, and running another in a browser. So I’m going to open up Edge. So this is now the browser and because I am working off of my med center owned device, if I go to teams.microsoft.com, it’s going to automatically recognize me as my medical center identity. So you see, it looks substantially the same as the Teams running behind it here. And now I can toggle back and forth and switch back to my university guest account, and now I can have my university guest Teams up and running in this browser window while at the same time I can have my desktop application Teams on the medical center running. So it’s not, strictly speaking, two instances of Teams because one is the desktop application and one is the browser based application. But that is a way that you could sort of access both sides on the same device at the same time.