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digital skills
This guide outlines support available to improve your digital skills, as well as point you to help with more specialised software that might be needed in your subject area.

Whether you consider yourself a digital expert or a newbie, it's important to think about the digital skills you already have and new ones you need to learn throughout you time at Staffs.

Digital skills: support provided by the Academic Skills Team

Academic Skills team members can help you with getting to grips with some of the key digital tools you will use such as MS Office 365, Library Search and accessing our wide range of electronic resources.

Some of the specific areas that a member of our team can help you with include:

  • Using MS Teams for appointments
  • Accessing online resources (Sway format)
  • Using Microsoft Office effectively
  • Managing your files and using OneDrive
  • Using PowerPoint for presentations or academic posters
  • Creating long documents in Word
  • Using Qualtrics survey software
  • Using  LinkedIn Learning online video training
  • Using RefWorks reference management software

Look out for workshops throughout the year or make an appointment to discuss any of the above topics.

Digital Skills: University Support

Support will be provided by your subject tutors and digital experts within your subject area but you may like to follow the university links below to help you to get started.

Induction guides

There are induction guides covering essential digital skills created by the TILE Hub.  These cover all the key systems you need to be familiar with to use our IT systems to study effectively.

  • An introduction to University Systems: Sway (includes: Usernames and Passwords; Accessing and Downloading MS Office, and Accessing email)
     
  • Induction: Digital Skills include:
    • All your IT Essentials 
    • Bite size videos - learn the essentials in one minute. Includes:  Wifi, email, Office 365, OneDrive, saving your work, essential apps and web pages

There are also Blackboard tutorials :

Many tutors are including these induction videos in either Blackboard or MS Teams so look out for links to these, or ask your tutor if you can't find them. 

Assessment and Feedback

There are guides to help you understand how to use to assessment areas within Blackboard and how to use Turnitin.

Turnitin

Turnitin is web-based text matching, electronic submission and feedback software. It is used by many universities in the UK and across the world. Turnitin compares the text in the work you submit with a vast database of electronic sources, including online journal articles, web pages and previously submitted student work. It can be used by staff as a tool to help identify plagiarism and poor academic practice. It can also be used to as a developmental tool to help improve your academic writing.

Turnitin is integrated into Blackboard, so you will only ever access Turnitin via your Blackboard courses. As Turnitin provides staff with a wide range of options it can be used in several ways so it is important that you check with your tutors if you have any specific questions on the user of Turnitin.  The guides below cover the essential features most likely to be used.

Digital Services support

Study Smarter with technology

There is a wide range of tools which you can use to help you study effectively.  These include tools to help everyone  with reading online, writing, text-to-speech, planning and organising, collaborating with others and more.  We have created a guide to recommended tools which are free to download, or are already in-built on the student computers.  

Need digital help?

If you are encountering any digital problems try these links for online support.