This lesson focuses on two skills: using your UIS-sponsored email account and organizing your digital workspace to maximize your ability to find the files you need when you need them.
As a student at UIS, you automatically receive a free email account to use. Your UIS email account is the official channel of communication between you and the university. Please get in the habit of checking it regularly. You can access it from any computer connected to the Internet. Using it is easy - and required for one of your assignments in this lesson. Take a look at the tutorial now and make sure you can read and send messages from your UIS web-based email.
If you still have questions about accessing your email after reviewing this tutorial, you can contact your instructor or UIS Tech support at techsupport@uis.edu.
Throughout your time at UIS, you'll be creating and receiving a lot of computer files. Sometimes it can be a challenge keeping up with them. Take a few minutes now to think about what will work best for you and start getting organized before it's too late.
Organizing your files by similar topic is useful for most people. As a Master's student, you may want to create a file for each class with associated projects and work inside the folder. Naming the folders is important, but don't worry if you think you might change your mind. It's easy to rename your folders. Once you create and name a folder for the class (maybe EDL 585 Foundations), you can create more folders inside to further organize your class work. One of the big projects for this class is a research paper. That should probably have a folder of its own. You can put your notes, outlines, and any reference materials in that. You might decide to make a folder for each week of the class or you might organize by topic. As you progress, you'll figure out a method that works well for you.
Naming your computer files is critical to your ability to stay organized. When you're working on your paper, it might make sense to name your file paper. Ask yourself if that file name will still make sense in another year or two. The chances are it won't. You will have written a lot of papers by then so a more descriptive file name now would be a good idea.
When you're naming a file that will be submitted to a professor, take a moment to think about what will help your professor. For you, assignment1 might make sense, but your professor probably gets dozens of papers called assignment1 in each semester. If you name your paper, LastName_assignment1, your professor will be able to find your work, look it over, and get back to you without needing to ask for it again.
Online students use email to communicate with the school, their professors, and their classmates. From time to time, it's useful to review correspondence you received from someone and finding an old email is much easier if you have your email organized. You can use the same ideas for organizing your email that you used to organize your hard drive. Take a moment now to set up an email folder (also called a mailbox) for this class. As you receive messages from your instructor and your classmates, move those messages with archival value into the class folder. If you're not sure whether or not a message is worth keeping, it's probably a good idea to keep it!
Consult the Help menu in your email software to learn how to set up new folders or mailboxes.
If you'd like, you can also set up "Rules" in your email client. Look at the Help menu to find out how to do this. You can specify that messages from certain senders get a specific treatment or go in a special folder. You can automatically forward messages or specify a special sound for certain messages.
Just be certain you don't set your email client to automatically delete messages from your instructor! Although that's technically possible, you can see how that would be a bad idea.
Many of your professors specify a rule that routes all email messages with a specific course number in the subject to a designated mail folder. This is one of the reasons they ask you to include the course number in the subject line. It helps them keep their correspondence sorted into the appropriate classes. You might consider doing the same.
| Many thanks to the Graphics Communications classes at City College of San Francisco for making the icons used on this page and for making them publicly available. |