Help for people using computers at home, at work, at Lehman:
by Ursula Hoffmann, Languages & Literatures -- January 2001
Download (include images if needed) or Print -- also tell your students
http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/acctemp/techteach/helpdocs/help.html
Traveling disks:
You may work at home, in an office, on campus.
You need to keep a few things in mind.
1. When using computers on campus, you have to save your
work on a floppy or zip 100 mb disk. (Floppy or zip disks for PCs and Macs
look alike, but are formatted differently. New Macs can read PC disks but
none of the PCs on campus can read Mac disks.)
2. Back up: Keep a second copy on another disk.
3. Treat your traveling disks with TLC. No spills, no
vicinity to anything that has an electro-magnetic field, no pencils (lead
is bad); keep them in containers that allow them to wobble; some of the
tight containers ruin your disks.
4. Make sure your file is readable. Software versions
are updated frequently; usually, they are backward compatible but, obviously,
they are never forward compatible. Example: a MS Word.doc file saved in
office 97 can be read in office 2000 but not the other way around. Check
it out: click Help, About... to see what software version is running. Make
sure you know what you have at home, in an office, on campus. If you are
editing your file on a computer using a version later than your own, do
not click Save but rather click Save as, and then select an earlier version
of your software.
5. Not every computer on campus runs the latest software
version. Therefore, if you save a file in Word Version 8, you cannot open
it with Word Version 6. (But a version 6 file can
be opened by the later version 8 software.) Good versions: Word v.2 and
WordPerfect v.5.1. Use Save as to find the correct version. You may lose
a bit of formatting but that is no big problem.
6. To transfer formatted text to transfer between Mac
and PC, save as .rtf. The RTF files are very large but they do work
on every system.
Start a bookmark file on your diskette:
Open Netscape, click on Bookmarks (upper left of the
screen). Click on Edit Bookmarks: this opens a new window. Click on File,
Save as: this opens a new window. In the File name box, type mybkmks.htm
or any other filename (except "bookmark.htm"). In the Save in box, click
on the downarrow, then on the uparrow and select Drive A. Click Save.
Use the bookmark file on your diskette:
Whenever you start a session on the Web, you want to
load your own bookmark file into the memory of the computer. Open Netscape,
click on Bookmarks, click on Edit bookmarks, click on File, click on Open
Bookmarks File, select your file on your diskette. Note that the title
bar of the little window shows the name of your own file. (If it says Bookmark.htm,
you made a mistake and you will not save bookmarks to your disk.) You can
close or minimize the bookmark window.
Now, when you find a site which you may wish to
return to later, click on Bookmark, then on Add Bookmark. The bookmark
is added at the end of your file. Click it to revisit the site.
A course on Blackboard:
Log into the course, twice. When logged in, save the
page as a bookmark. Now, click on Bookmarks, find the course page, singleclick
it and drag up to Personal bookmarks. From now on, you need to log in only
once.
Instead of printing or taking notes while reading pages on the Web,
I suggest copying and pasting.
If any application is open, close or minimize it. Click
the X or the Underline in the upper right corner of the screen.
Open Notepad, start a new document, title it My Notes,
save it as mynotes.txt to your diskette. Minimize Notepad (click on the
underline in the upper right corner). It is now an icon on your taskbar,
at the bottom of your screen.
Open Netscape, go to the page that interests you. Select
the Location, copy it to memory (Ctrl-c).
Click Notepad (on the task bar at the bottom of your
screen). Put the cursor on a new line, paste the Location (also called
URL) by pressing Ctrl-v. Press Ctrl-s to save.
Click Netscape. Select material you want to use, copy,
switch to Notepad and paste. Save.
References: style sheets for documenting sources; copyright and
"fair use"rules:
apa style sheet: apa.html - http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/acctemp/techteach/helpdocs/apa.html
mla style sheet:
mla.html - http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/acctemp/techteach/helpdocs/mla.html
Copyright and Fair Use guidelines: Copyright
and Fair Use Guidelines, Writer's Handbook with stylesheets - http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/acctemp/techteach/helpdocs/netref.htm
More - http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/acctemp/techteach/helpdocs/ref.htm
Blackboard for Students:
one-page Handout: Blackboard for Students
- http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/acctemp/techteach/helpdocs/bb4students.htm
Accented and other foreign characters:
The US International Keyboard in Windows (especially useful for
French, German, Italian, Spanish)
This allows you to type French, German, Spanish text easily. This may
be installed at Lehman.
To install it at home, doubleclick ControlPanel, click Keyboard Layout,
select US-International, click OK. (At this point you may be prompted to
insert a Windows disk that contains the needed driver.) Use a common Windows
font, such as Times Roman or Courier or Arial, that has the full character
set.
With non-Roman alphabets, as for Greek, Japanese, Russian, you need
foreign fonts and a special keyboard layout.
With text in some other languages (e.g., French or Italian or Spanish
with accents, German with umlauts), you only need a few special characters.
These must be inserted manually if you use a Mac or a DOS word processor.
But if you use Windows, set the keyboard to US International before
creating your file. Open the Control Panel, click the International icon,
click the downarrow to the right of Keyboard Layout, select US International.
You may need to install this from your set of Windows disks if you have
never used it before. Click on OK when done. Some of us leave our keyboard
set to US International all the time. Be sure to use a font which has
the full character set, such as Times Roman or Arial.
For English: type " or ', press the spacebar, then type the vowel.
http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/acctemp/techteach/helpdocs/keyboard.htm
Online Help: Internet, Lehman Alpha e-mail
Technical support online: vendors, products,
tips
Freeware and Shareware downloads