Please note that the course webpage may be updated during the term with more specific class materials, links and handouts.

Class 1: Hardware & software – preparing your computer
* securing your computer - anti-virus (e.g. avast! 4 Home), firewall (e.g. Zone Alarm Free), anti-spyware (e.g. Spybot Search and  Destroy)
* browsers and their components: Firefox/Opera/Flock [Please note that the English department faculty DO NOT condone, encourage or tolerate use of Internet Explorer.]
* what you see is what you get - video codecs
* PDF files - Adobe Reader
* file manager - Total Commander
* Flash player - Adobe Flash Player
* download manager - Flash Get
* image viewer - IrfanView or Picasa
* a cup of java - Java Virtual Machine
* setting up web-based email account – essential for various course website registrations (preferred Gmail or o2 due to mailbox capacity)
* setting up a Google account
* creating folders for data storage on a non-OS partition

Class 2: Working in Microsoft Word/Open Office  
* initial page settings
* text formatting
* punctuation - hyphen vs. dash and their spacing - handout with some rules for punctuation in academic writing
* inserting and working with footnotes and endnotes
* formatting blocked quotations in the text
* spellcheck – choosing the language/performing spellcheck
* working with tables/using tables for clean layout
* tracking and reviewing changes in MS Word/OpenOffice
* generating PDF files in OpenOffice
* copying text from other sources

Practice MSWord file
Sample PDF file for in-class tasks
Sample site for in-class task
Sample text for in-class task

Class 3: Preparing presentations in PowerPoint (can be moved to the end of the course)

Class 4: RSS and social bookmarking
* RSS as the most effective method of aggregating information
* setting up RSS feeds in Bloglines/Google Reader/RSS Owl
* social bookmarking and its uses – http://del.icio.us, http://shadows.com

Sites to be used in class:
New York Times
Gazeta Wyborcza
Polityka
CNN
GHacks - blog
Steven Shaviro’s blog
GrandTextAuto - blog

Class 5: Storing bookmarks and data
* in-browser bookmarks and their management
* saving webpages and websites offline
* saving webpages online – http://www.furl.net  
* saving short text snippets, notes, etc – Notebark Lite /TreePad Lite/ Slogger plugin for Firefox)

Class 6: Online encyclopedias and language-related wbesites
* Wikipedia.com and other WikiMedia Foundation projects
* Britannica.com
* Answers.com
* YourDictionary
* Merriam-Webster
* Online corpora - British National Corpus
* A very good list of other dictionaries and language resources

 

Class 7: Google.com as a language tool
* power-searching / constructing effective search-engine queries
* HyperWords extension for Firefox
* using Google for language verification
* Wayback Machine: http://archive.org  

Class 8: Online research
* finding and using online materials
* storing and citing online materials - Zotero - Library of Congress / Amazon

* using specialized search engines

- Sputter
- Seekful
- Aftervote
- many more search engines

* evaluating usefulness of search results
* Amazon and SearchInside option
* newspaper and journal online archives, e.g. Wired, New York Times
* blogs as source of reliable information http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/

Class 9: Free-access and commercial academic databases and repositories
* EBSCO
* Findarticles.com
* Questia
* Google Scholar
* Google Book Search
* free academic databases and archives
* databases in Biblioteka Glowna UMCS (available only from campus computers)

Class 10: Online bookstores – how to find a bargain
* using Amazon with BookBurro extension for Firefox
* online bookstores Abebooks.co.uk,  Abebooks.com, Alibris.com, Half.com, Empik.com  

Class 11: Overview of TEFL websites

 

Class 12: Education and language CD-ROMs.