Guest post – DigiLearn: Utilising the Microsoft Educator Center (MEC)
Author: Steven Seymour – Service User and Carer Involvement Facilitator/Associate Lecturer in the School of Social Work, Care & Community at UCLan.
Microsoft offers a wide range of information, courses and even certificates around digital learning and innovation. The platform allows you to utilise all it has to offer on the go, at a time to suit you, no matter the length of time you have to spare.
If you haven’t tried it already go to the Microsoft Educator Centre, you can set up an account if you don’t have one and then you have access to a global resource for educators. Start by exploring courses, there are a wide range and you can favourite these courses, resources and quick tips, then they will appear in your MEC Home Page.
Working with colleagues across the university, I have had the pleasure of hearing how they have been using different applications and the benefits that Office 365 has to offer. However, I haven’t always known what these applications were or how to use them. A quick search on the site allows me to find out more and offers training videos and other’s experiences. Some of my favourite ones so far are:-
A really quick guide to Microsoft Teams. If you want more information on how to use Teams or how it can benefit your staff team or students visit the Professional Learning for Educators page for a number of other courses you can do.
One of my other favourite Microsoft applications has to be OneNote. I can keep all of my notes in one place. Being an organised person, I like my notes to be collected into categories so that they can follow on from each other. I have tabs for meetings, training and development, public engagement and so on. Unlike traditional pen and paper, OneNote allows me to search for specific information making it quick and easy to find that note on that thing from my rambles.
Overall the MEC allows you to learn from others, test the technology, and hopefully then embed it into your own work. You can also earn certificates and badges too!
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