Technology Tips of the Week - November 15, 2005

Rich Text Format - The Electronic Answer to Compatibility

Many faculty are taking advantage of the ability to electronically distribute documents like syllabi, assignments and handouts to their students. This quick and easy alternative to endless photocopying and lugging around tons of paper can be achieved in many different ways - such as adding attachments to class e-mail in Pipeline, or uploading as files and linking within Pipeline courses, WebCT courses or faculty web pages. However if your documents are primarily saved as Microsoft Word documents students who don't have Word on their home computers will not be able to view and/or print the documents. Saving your documents in rich text format (.rtf) right within Word is a simple fix for this challenge. Any word processing program can open an .rtf document. You can quickly convert any Word document to .rtf format right within Word (no special program needed) and it only takes seconds. Once you've converted the document, make sure you send out the .rtf version to your students!

To convert a document to rich text format:

Open your document in Word

Go to File - Save As from the menu bar at the top

Select Rich Text Format from the drop-down box next to Files of type: at the bottom of the window

Click on Save

That's it...you're done! And best of all, so are your students' compatibility problems. Print out an expanded handout on this process at http://it.ccri.edu/Documentation/Web_Training/word_to_rtf.pdf

Website of the Week

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a wonderful website that contains hundreds of learning materials specifically intended for higher education faculty. Membership is free and all the materials have been designed by faculty and openly shared with anyone who can use them. The collections are divided into Arts - Business, Education, Humanities, Mathematics and Statistics, Science and Technology and Social Sciences. There are even annotations, peer reviews and assignments included.

Browse around the site and take a look at some of the ever-growing collection of materials to see if there is something you can use with your classes. The website url is: http://www.m

Feel free to post your opinions of the site in the Teaching Forum message board.

These tips are provided by the Department of Information Technology instructional support team. If you have any questions on these tips, or wish to offer your own, please feel free to contact Linda Beith at lbeith@ccri.edu.