Monday, February 22, 2016

A Short Between-Term Break

Here in Davenport, we are in finals week, and have the next week off. I wish you all a relaxing time away and will return when the new term begins.

Monday, February 8, 2016

Taking a Screen Shot (in Windows)

Not everyone is aware of how to take a screen shot of their computer screen. Let me detail here a couple of ways you can do so. What this would do is allow you make a copy of either the full screen or part of the screen and inset it into another document, such as a Word file, a PowerPoint slide or email.

Full Screen
Press the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard. This will be found to the right of the F12 key up at top. It will not flash or anything, but it will have captured the screen. Now that you hav a copy, you need to paste it somewhere. Since it is an image, so you simply paste it into a program or you can edit it. If you wish to edit it, you first need to paste it into an editor. You have one- it is called Paint, and you can find it from your computer start button, under “All Files.” Open Paint, and they you can paste it into the screen there, and save it as a jpeg or png file. Otherwise, you can simply insert what you have copied into some other program. Editing allows you to do things such as paste an arrow onto the image, to highlight something, just as example. And of course, you can simply save the image you copied for later use.

Partial Image
For this, you need to use what is known as the Snipping Tool (not present in Windows XP, by the way). You can find this tool by again selecting All Programs from the start button, and opening it. When you do, there is a drop-down menu that allows you to select options such as “Free-form snip,” “rectangular snip,” and “full-screen snip.” These should be self-explanatory. And you can also choose the color of the border of your snip. Select your snip option, then click “New snip.” The screen will sort of fade and you can then select the area you wish to copy. When you stop, it opens a new window and you can then annotate the clip, save it as PNG or other, and use it. In this case, once saved you can open and copy it for insertion into other programs.

It is useful tool. If you have not used it before, give it a try.

Monday, February 1, 2016

Turnitin.com, Part 4

Final continuation of information from the turnitin.com Instructional Guide (https://guides.turnitin.com/01_Manuals_and_Guides/Instructor/Instructor_QuickStart_Guide)

Step 8 - Viewing Originality Reports
Your Assignment Inbox shows submitted papers with their Originality Reports if available. To open the Originality Report for the paper you just submitted, click the report icon. Note: A grayed out report icon indicates that the report has not yet been generated. Please wait a few moments and click your browser's refresh button.

The Originality Report will open in a new window called the Document Viewer. The Document Viewer allows instructors to access each Turnitin product in one location and view all the products simultaneously as layers.
All the top sources found to match the paper submission are in the sidebar to the right of the paper contents. Top sources are the sources that have the closest match (most matching words without variation) to the document's text.

To view all underlying sources for a top source hover the cursor over the source and click on the arrow icon. The overlapping sources are listed below the top source.

To exclude a source from the Match Breakdown list click on the 'Select Sources to be Excluded' button at the bottom of the source list.
Click on the check box next to all the sources you would like to exclude.

Once you have selected all the sources to exclude, click on the 'Exclude (#)' button at the bottom of the Match Breakdown list. If the sources that were excluded affects the Similarity Index it will recalculate and display a new percentage of matching content.

Step 9 - Leaving Feedback on Submissions
From the Assignment Inbox click on the blue pencil icon next to the paper title to open the paper in GradeMark to grade the student submission online. The GradeMark system contains several tools and types of mark that instructors can use in grading and assessing papers.

These include:
  • comments
  • inline comments
  • QuickMark comments
  • rubric scorecards
  • general comments
  • voice comments
For more information about GradeMark please view our GradeMark training pages or use our GradeMark interactive tutorial