Taking Ctrl: Paste text without Formatting

The Problem

I often copy and paste bits of text from one place to another, but don’t necessarily want the formatting that comes with the text. Just using Ctrl + V, or selecting ‘paste’ brings that formatting across. This means that text might look ‘odd’ when pasting it into another document, or something like a Canvas page.

The Method

  • Windows: Ctrl + Shift + V
  • Mac: Option + Shift + Command + V

The Solution

This means you just keep the characters, meaning your pasted text looks the same as the rest. This works in lots of desktop applications.

Microsoft Applications

To do this in Word, right-click and select ‘paste without formatting’ as below.

Try it today!

How did you do that so fast? Introducing Taking Ctrl

Introducing a new series – Taking Ctrl – a guide to keyboard shortcuts that can save you time!

Many of the tasks we do using the computer have a ready keyboard shortcut to speed up the task, though we might not always know what these are. We have asked the FMS TEL team to share their favourite keyboard shortcuts in this series. This is the team at their most geeky – enjoy, and see how much time you can save!

Our first keyboard shortcut is Windows key + E. This opens up your file explorer – much faster than looking for that icon.

New Year’s Resolutions

Whether you’re planning to try something new, or simply get organised, take a look at this selection of FMS TEL Blog Posts to kick start your January.

Whether you’re planning to try something new, or simply get organised, take a look at this selection of FMS TEL Blog Posts to kick start your January.

Enrol in the FMS TEL Canvas Community on Canvas or the MLE to access our full guides, previous training webinars and a range of other resources.

2022 Roundup

This post summarises posts from 2022 – thank you to all of our contributors!

We hope you have enjoyed learning more about the work we do in FMS TEL, below are a few areas we covered and successes we had in 2022. If you have any suggestions for content for 2023 we would love to hear from you.

Awards and Prizes

Ashley Reynolds and Eleanor Gordon were delighted to be announced winners of the ‘Best Video Award’ during the NU Teaching & Learning Conference for their video ‘Creating and using animations to explain concepts’.

Eleanor Gordon (left) and Ashley Reynolds (right)

Work done by the School of Dentistry and FMS TEL Team won first prize at the Trans-European Pedagogic Anatomical Research Group Hybrid Conference this year, for the presentation on ‘Adopting a flexible approach to professional anatomy spotter exams during COVID’. Newcastle Staff can view the poster here for an overview or read the internal news item on SharePoint.

2022 Conferences

For the second year running we ran our very own FMS TEL conference. We had sessions on Accessibility, Augmented Reality, Lab Teaching, Escape Rooms and more. The materials are available on the FMS TEL Conference 2022 page.

Several members of the FMS TEL team also attended the NULT Conference this year, giving strong representation of the team. We delivered sessions on Developing audio commentated interviews, Designing Convertible Teaching and Using Canvas Commons.

Technology, Software and Systems

WRS Screenshot: individual workload summary

This year we showcased The FMS Workload Reporting System (WRS) and the new Personal Tutoring Application.

We explored 3D scanners and 360° Cameras and advanced our use of Canvas and PowerPoint.

Tips and Guides

We did quick fix posts for Screen Sharing with Presenter View, Additional scroll bars in canvas and Searching Outlook Emails.

We have shared guides on Captioning, Transcription and, how to improve teaching with Motion tracking in Recorded Presentations and the use of timers in synchronous teaching.

Assessment and Feedback were important topics this year with posts on Instant Feedback, Live Feedback, Virtual Oral Presentations and Effective Rubrics.

Thank You!

The blog is edited by a different FMS TEL team member every month, and many team members have taken on this task, as well as contributing posts to the blog – thank you to all of you! Our thanks also go to those colleagues who have offered their examples of practice for us to showcase here. We look forward to working with many more of you in 2023.

FMS TEL Conference 2022 – behind the scenes

This post is a review of the conference experience by FMS TEL members John Keogan and Andy Stokes.

This years conference was going to be a bit different to any conference we had ran in the past, the decision was made for the 2022 conference to be hybrid! We would run in-person presentations, online only sessions, and some sessions would be a hybrid of both. We were excited to take advantage of the video-conferencing technologies on offer within the University.

Using lessons learnt from last years online version, we set out tasks to complete and deadlines to meet.

The Tasks

clipboard with list

We divided the main tasks between us and ran through the list of jobs involved in preparing for the conference. We quickly realised that there was lot more involved than we initially thought!

The main tasks included:

  • timetabling
  • booking rooms
  • communications (including mail merges)
  • creating online conference materials

One aspect of the preparation was getting word out about the conference. We approached schools within the faculty and asked them to put up posters in areas with heavy footfall, as well as staffrooms. We put up posters in cafes, corridors and even lifts – please let us know if you saw them! We also requested that the campus messaging screens carried information about the conference in FMS areas. 

Tips

Room Bookings

  • Consider your criteria before booking, for example:
    • ‘Is the room big enough?’
    • ‘Do the speakers work?’
    • ‘Can we connect a laptop to the projectors?’
  • The room bookings website is not always accurate when you nominate the relative criteria; i.e. ‘Hybrid’, ‘videoconference’ etc.
  • Give yourself enough time to visit the rooms in person (It’s also worthwhile booking the rooms for when you plan to test them, as they can be snapped up pretty quickly in term time).
  • Reserved your rooms well in advance! 

Technology

  • Contact the Audio Visual team for a demonstration of the hybrid technology. They showed us how to set up and use the cameras and mics, and also how to troubleshoot common problems.
  • Consider your booking platform and its limitations, we used workshops.ncl which required us to use an iCal maker so delegates could add the events to their diaries.
  • Familiarise yourself with video editing software. As a team we edited the recordings using a mix of ReCap, Premiere Pro and Adobe Rush.
  • Schedule a block of time to review captions. We have some excellent posts on how to edit your captions.

Conclusion

Overall, the conference was a great success and we all enjoyed our time being part of the 2022 FMS TEL Conference team.

Being new to running a conference we developed skills and knowledge during the journey. The encouragement and support from our team helped ensure that we fulfilled our tasks and that looming deadlines were met.

We learned things that we will do different, or better, next year and we hope the tips shared in this post will be a good starting point for anyone wanting to run their own conference.

Assessment and Marking Refresher

The January assessment period will be upon us all very soon. Why not take some time over the next few weeks to refresh your knowledge.

Below are a few resources previously delivered or created by the FMS TEL team:

🎦 Canvas Assessment Training 

  • Setting Up Assessments
  • Creating Rubrics
  • Turnitin Plagiarism Detection
  • Marking and Moderation

🎦 Effective Rubrics

  • Designing Effective Rubrics for Marking and Feedback
  • Best practice when deciding how to put your rubric together
  • Rubric design workflow
  • Setting up and using Rubrics in Turnitin

🎦 Adaptive Release Feedback

  • Comments before grades
  • Technological affordances available
  • Recorded audio feedback

📄 Multiple Markers 

  • How to allocate students to a marker
  • How to filter Speedgrader to see only your marking section

We ALL Draw!

During the FMS TEL Conference, Leonard Shapiro of the University of Cape Town presented an overview of the many ways in which people draw, dispelled myths about the ‘quality’ of a drawing, and covered some of the many ways in which drawing can be useful in learning and in communication once we stop judging ourselves on our artistic skill.

You can watch Leonard’s talk in Panopto.

The university has a range of tools that allow us to draw for learning and communication, and draw collaboratively when teaching in person and online, such as smart boards, interactive whiteboards, and collaborative whiteboards in Zoom and Teams, as well as note making apps on devices we have in our pockets.

Drawing as a method to understand 3D anatomical structures is central to Leonard’s work – how might drawing allow your students to take a different viewpoint in your subject?

You may also wish to consider the approaches and methods used in the other linked FMS TEL videos below:

Searching Outlook Emails

This quick guide gives you tips on how to boost the power of your Outlook searches.

The FMS TEL team was recently discussing the options for searching for emails in Outlook. Most of us are familiar with the search tool and can use the basic function. But there are ways to supercharge your searches in Outlook.

Advanced Search

The first option is to use the Advance Search feature. To use this feature simply click on the Search bar then click on the open menu carrot on the right side of the Search bar.

Use the Advanced search options to specify criteria for your search. This interface is easy to use and understand. Search for emails based on sender, dates, subjects, attachments, and more.

Search Operators

You can also conduct specific searches using Outlooks search language operators. Here is a list of some of the search operators you can use to quickly search for specific results.

Search forFindings
PatAnything containing the string pat including Pat, pattern, sympathy
Pat SmithAnything containg the string pat or the string smith, including as part of a larger word
Pat AND SmithAnything containg both strings pat and smith, including as part of a larger word
Pat NOT SmithAnything containing the string pat but not the string smith, including as part of a larger word
Pat OR SmithThe same as searching Pat Smith
“Pat”Anything containing the string pat alone, not including as part of a larger word
from:”pat smith”Anything sent from Pat smith
from:”pat smith”
about:”status report”		Anything sent from Pat smith that includes the phrase status report in the subject line
Hasattachment:yesAnything with an attahcment
attachments:document.docxAnything containing an attachment called document.docx
subject:”status report”Anything with the subject including the phrase status report
received:15/2/2022Anything received on 15 February 2022
from:pat (received:15/2/2022 or received:16/3/2022)Anyting received from a sender with string pat on 15 February 2022 or 16 March 2022

We hope these search tips will prove useful to you in your future Outlook email searches.

For more information about working with Outlook, check out our blog about managing your emails.

FMS TEL Conference 2022 – Digital Posters

The FMS TEL Conference 2022 is up and running.

To accompany the 16 sessions running between 7th-11th November from 08:00 GMT / 16:00 MYT each day, there are some digital posters which you can access below.

Using Adobe Acrobat to Improve Accessibility pdf

Michelle Miller, PhD – FMS TEL
Using Adobe Acrobat’s Accessibility tool and how its use can improve the documents we provide to our students and colleagues.

DOWNLOAD

A formal case- based peer assisted learning session in undergraduate medical curriculum: Malaysian medical students’ thoughts and beliefs pdf

Dr Alice Kurien, Senior Lecturer, NUMed
Peer assisted learning (PAL) model is being increasingly implemented in many universities as an important active learning support tool to facilitate constructive learning and to enhance the confidence level of students. Several studies have identified the various benefits of peer assisted learning in undergraduate medical education, such as enjoyable learning environment, improved knowledge acquisition, teamwork, opportunity for self-assessment, and motivation to become teachers and mentors in their future carrier. One of the outcomes expected of doctors is to see themselves as teachers and mentors in their future carrier (GMC, 2015).

DOWNLOAD

Peer Assisted Learning in Undergraduate Medical  Curriculum-A Literature Review pdf

Dr Vasantha Subramaniyam, Clinical Senior Lecturer, and Dr Alice Kurien, Senior Lecturer, NUMed
A career in health profession does not just limit to patient care, but includes clinical teaching, research, and administrative duties. To address this effectively GMC recommends to introduce teaching to medical students (GMC,2015). Acting upon this advice, many institutions have revived and started implementing an ancient teaching methodology used by Socrates & Plato, the Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) (Topping, 1998). PAL is a broader umbrella term which includes many entities like Peer learning & teaching, Peer mentoring, Peer leadership and Peer assessments. (Henning, 2008). PAL has been noted  to improve the student engagement, self confidence, performance and overall performance (Smith, 2018).

DOWNLOAD