Notebook is a new feature in the Web version of Microsoft Copilot, which Newcastle University staff and students currently have licenced access to via https://copilot.microsoft.com (make sure you sign in using your University credentials – you may also need to use “Switch to a work or school account” in the profile menu).
Screenshot of Copilot Notebook
The first thing to notice about Copilot Notebook is it’s extended character limit of up to 18,000 characters, which is much more than the standard Copilot chat, which has a character limit of 4,000. This is particularly useful when you need assistance with longer content, such as essays, papers, or articles that require proofreading or summarising.
The true power of Notebook lies in It’s facility for prompt iteration. In many A.I. Chat tools, tweaking a prompt usually generates brand-new results, often losing the context of the previous answer. However, in Notebook, your previous prompt remains intact after initial answers are generated. This means you can more easily tweak the original prompt and iteratively refine it, to optimise the answers that the A.I. generates.
Of course the disclaimer “Copilot uses AI. Check for mistakes” remains true of generative AI services in general. A.I. can generate many accurate answers, but occasionally have “A.I. Hallucination”, where convincing answers may include false or misleading information, presented as fact. Nevertheless, the time-saving benefits are potentially significant.
Using A.I. effectively involves you developing the skills and experience to write more precise prompts and to take the time to read results and quality assure them. The layout of the Web version of Copilot Notebook, with prompt on the left and results on the right (see screenshot), complement the development of these skills.
The current licence held by Newcastle University doesn’t include Copilot integration with your documents, Outlook Emails, Calendars etc. So don’t expect great results for questions which are University, Faculty or School specific (integrating contextualised University and Faculty-specific information is something we are exploring in our ERDP A.I. Chatbot project). However, Copilot Notebook can be very useful for generating general subject related answers, or refining your specific content.
In summary, Copilot Notebook gives you a new interface to refine your prompts to get more precise results. The more generous character limit is helpful, for example when drafting plans, generating ideas, or organising information.
By now you will likely be using the ‘new’ Microsoft Teams. At first glance you might only spot a few superficial differences compared to ‘classic’ Teams, which most of the Faculty and the wider University adopted en-mass during the Pandemic. However, the desktop application has been completely rebuilt and does offer some significant enhancements. Microsoft will be beginning a phased retirement of Classic Teams from 31st March 2024, so it’s a good time to take a look at the new features.
Why the changes? • To improve efficiency. The New Teams is claimed to be 2x faster and uses 50% less memory used, saving battery power and with faster start up. • To simplify and streamline. The new Teams offers a toned-down appearance and other subtle changes make it look more like a native Windows 11 app (though there still remain differences in Web, PC Desktop, Mac, PWA and mobile versions of Teams). • To be AI ready – Teams will be supporting proprietary AI features from other Microsoft Apps (many of these are behind paywalls, so not available for everyone, if your organisation hasn’t paid extra for the licence).
Teams and Chat Teams, Chat and Activity, remain the familiar main “apps” in Microsoft Teams in addition to video calls/meetings. Up to now, finding stuff on Teams has been challenging, but the new version has search within Teams Channels and within Chats.
Search in a Teams Channel
Search in a chat
One useful change in Teams (but sadly not Chat) is that new posts automatically open in the rich format editor – meaning less embarrassing part messages sent, when you accidentally hit return! There is also the option to change the order for viewing posts in a channel – newest at the top or newest at the bottom.
Switching between a “Post” or “Announcement” is a little easier in the new Teams. Announcements have a coloured header and headline. After you start a post, there is a small button to change the post type. Including an image in the announcement heading is currently broken, and in future this might be AI generated.
Posting an Announcement
Forwarding messages in Chat is also easier (right click on the message and use Forward from the … options). In the desktop version you can now “Pop out” a chat into a new Window. Also, you can now delete a chat (as well as Hide) but this deletes it for you only (not others in the chat) and you may need to delete files in the message separately.
Forwarding a chat message
If you are the owner of a team, there is a new option to Archive the team. At that point members can still view, but can’t start new chats/reply etc., but you can still add/remove members. You can also unarchive if needed.
Three Dot-tastic! … The horizontal three dots (…) are used even more extensively in the new Teams, signifying a “more options” menu. In some views there are up to 6 of the three dots in different places around the screen! Not a major issue, but a bit of a nightmare if you are writing instructions, or if you are offering Help Desk advice; “just click on the three dots…” Oh, and sometimes it’s referred to as the “meatballs menu”.
Common menu icons
Other Changes Settings have all been moved into one place (via the top right …menu), which simplifies things. The Presence (status) has been made more reliable, but you may still appear “Away” whist busy working in other applications. You can also now set your status (Available, Do Not Disturb etc) for a specific duration. Work location (Office or Remote) can be set for the current day.
Some of the “Apps” within Teams have changed. “Files” is now “One Drive”. “Tasks” is currently “Tasks by Planner and To Do”. Calendar has a new agenda view. There are some new apps too – you can add People, Meet and Co-Pilot (if paid for by your organisation) via the three dot menu in the left-hand App pane. Calendar, Meet and People have a lot of overlap with other Microsoft products but may be worth a look, depending on your preferences. “People” gives you a place to manage NU and external contacts in one place. It was automatically populated for me with contacts from over 20 years from Outlook, but many had long since left the University. You can categorise contacts, but the big limitation is that you can’t share contacts with your team (presumably Microsoft don’t want you to miss out on the opportunity of paying for an expensive CRM solution!). “Meet” is intended to let you see all your meetings in one place. You can add new people and have a pre-meet chat. AI is used to identify if you are working on a doc with people involved in the meeting. There are also recordings of meeting calls (if available). There are a growing number of third party apps that you can add – Microsoft appear to be encouraging an ecosystem similar to Android and Apple’s App Stores, around Teams. Presumably they are accelerating this strategy as competition to develop marketplaces for new AI apps intensifies.
Add Apps
Some people may belong to multiple organisations and have different accounts on Teams (we have “Tenancy” on NU Sharepoint; some within FMS also have accounts with NHS organisations, research councils, or other partners). The new Teams makes it easier to switch and notifications and activity is easier to see in other Tenancies, without switching accounts. But don’t switch tenancy mid call, or you risk being kicked off your call!
Be Aware! • Teams has been rebuilt from the ground up – so there are some initial bugs. For example, spell checking is intermittently broken; currently US English only (at 1st March 2024) • Some people at NU are reporting fewer notifications than expected; some may have been lost on migration from Classic teams – so it is worth reviewing your notification settings for each Team you are in. • Updates to Teams are happening frequently – so update to the latest version regularly (at least ensure automatic updates are enabled). Since writing this article, in the space of a week, “CoPilot” had disappeared as a distinct native app in Teams, but there are several CoPilot-based specialist apps and more third party apps are appearing.
Acknowledgements and Further Information This article draws on a Webinar by Jo Robinson-Lamb & Lucy Bolt from the NUIT Digital Adoption Team and information about changes to Teams on the Microsoft Website. Opinions given here are entirely personal to the author.
Last month we welcomed Nick Jensen to the FMS TEL team, as Senior Digital Skills Demonstrator.
Nick has joined the FMS TEL team to cover the role of Senior Demonstrator. Nick is co-ordinating a group of PGRs who assume the role of Digital Skills Demonstrators. As part of the wider remit of the department he delivers our digital skills provision, teaching students digital skills and techniques.
Nick brings insider knowledge with him, having previously been a Digital Skills Demonstrator himself for a four-year period from 2019 to 2023.
Using a problem based approach to help students help themselves, Nick and our team offer digital capabilities instruction in sessions that both directly and indirectly support student work (from undergraduate course assignments to PhD theses). We offer more than 100 sessions, serving over 2000 students each year. We deliver sessions both on campus and online.
“Having worked with the FMS TEL Digital Skills team for more than 4 years, applying to the Senior Demonstrator role was the perfect progression. I have previous managerial experience in the Further Education sector, and with my long-term career goals of procuring an academic support role in Higher Education, this role seemed like a logical next step. Since commencing the role some highlights have been running a staff training session for new and returning demonstrators, being involved with a Senior colleague in their interviewing processes and getting to put my own stamp on the teaching resources through re-vamping the content.”
Michelle Miller shared her work in digital skills and accessibility at the Learning and Teaching Conference in March this year. This poster shows how you can improve your PDFs’ accessibility using Adobe Acrobat Pro, including common issues flagged by Ally, the accessibility checker in Canvas. All colleagues have access to this software.
In FMS and SAgE, students can produce heavily mathematical theses. These can be difficult to manage in Microsoft Word as it is not designed for documents that include a lot of equations and other mathematical notations. Furthermore, theses are often very large documents with each chapter in a separate file. Compiling those chapters into a single document is something that LaTeX is ideal for. It was designed with professional typesetting so that users can focus on their content and not the style of the document.
Here at FMS TEL, we added a session in LaTeX to our catalogue of digital skills sessions a few years ago, and since the pandemic we have transitioned this to a webinar with some interactivity.
LaTeX is an open-source mark-up language so the training sessions are on primarily on learning the LaTeX code. This enables postgraduates to set up their documents from scratch or, more likely, to modify pre-existing templates such as the template that we provide them on the Digital Skills Hub or working a boilerplate paper. The slides used in the session are also provided on the Digital Skills Hub as well as some additional materials used during the session such as the graph files used.
Sessions are in two parts and cover how to set up your document in LaTeX, incorporating comments, mathematics, images, bibliography and references, tables and matrices, and more. There are many different LaTeX editors but the training session is built around the Overleaf.com editor as that is completely in the cloud and therefore nothing needs to be installed to be able to use it. It is free to use unless collaboration is needed with a document or other advanced needs. Skills learned with this editor should be easily transferable to other editors.
We have had a great response to the LaTeX training session. It is always very popular and we get a lot of positive feedback from participants.
Are you supervising a postgraduate student? If so, consider recommending Digital Skills workshops to help them with the process of formatting their thesis.
Digital Skills offers a series of four workshops specifically designed to help postgraduate students to format their thesis effectively and efficiently in Microsoft Word to University standards.
Sessions cover the use of Styles, caption and cross-referencing, customising multilevel lists, managing images and tables, modifying EndNote output, and merging chapter files. These skills provide students with the ability to create a successfully formatted thesis.
The first in the series of sessions takes place on 21st October 10-12pm. Encourage your students to sign up now via Workshops. Alternatively, students can complete the tutorial in their own time via the Digital Skills website.
