Coming Soon - Fantastic Beasts event

Coming soon - Fantastic Beasts event

Next Wednesday we are holding a Fantastic Beasts event to mark the release of the second film the Crimes of Grindelwald. Various curriculm areas are joining us. The hospitality section are making and selling biscuits, the Raptor Foundation are bringing owls and the animal care section are showcasing some of their insects and reptiles. The youth centre are holding a craft stall and we will have a tombola to raise money for Wood Green Animal Shelter.

We are also giving everyone the opportunity to enter our pet photography competition (open for entries now - send your photos to the LRC) or even win a prize for dressing up in fancy dress for the day!

Fantastic Beasts resources and activities for you to try (with some Google tips) - 

To get you in the mood, we've put together some activities and online resources with a Fantastic Beasts theme. Some will help you learn how to find things on the internet, some will help you learn, some will make you think about the websites you view and some are just fun.

• Use Google's image search to find what a niffler looks like.

• Use Google maps to find out where the place Grindlewald is (slightly different spelling to the film character).

• Find a trailer of the Crimes of Grindelwald on Internet Movie Database. Just put the keywords - (fantastic beasts crimes Grindelwald) - in to your search. You don't need to use the "of" as this will be ignored anyway.                                                                                                          IMDB can also tell you who is in the film and by clicking on their name you can see what else they have been in. Who plays Leta Lestrange and in what other films/ tv dramas will you see her? Was she in the first film?

• Find out when Fantastic Beasts Crimes of Grindelwald is on at the cinema by typing movie: crimes grindelwald in to the search box in Google. It will usually default to your nearest location but if you want to know when it is on in Norwich for examples type movie: crimes grindelwald norwich. You can use this for any film and location.

• Find out how to make baked nifflers:

• Read the BBC's article Can exotic animals make good pets? How many licensed tigers were there in the UK in 2016? Why might you think twice about using this web article in an assignment?

• The RSPCA has advice about keeping exotic pets. Do you think keeping exotic pets such as snakes and reptiles is a good idea? Discuss with your friends the pros and cons or why not ask some of the animal care students at the event?

• Some of you may want to get some advice on taking photos of your pet for our competition (we already have a lot of entries which will be on display on Wednesday). Have a look at these 2 websites and decide who are they written for.Which would you use and why?https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/technique/wildlife_photography/photographing-pets-pet-photography-tip-566                                                                              https://www.bluecross.org.uk/pet-advice/how-to-photograph-pets

• Have a look at some animal anatomy in our eBooks Introduction to veterinary anatomy and physiology textbook, Animal biology and care or  The complete textbook of animal health and welfare. You will need to use your network login and password.

• Finally for a bit of fun do the Beano's personality quiz - Which Fantastic Beast are you?

• The Independent also has a Which Fantastic Beast from Harry Potter are you? quiz but you will have to watch an advert first! They also have another more challenging quiz What mythical creature are you?

Be Healthy Stay Safe and Anti-bullying Week

Be Healthy Stay Safe event

This week we had a stand at the College's Be Healthy Stay Safe event. We worked with the College police officer who provided high-viz strips for cyclists for us to give away. Our stand included information about staying safe after dark.

LRC Be Healthy Stay Safe Stand 2018
Photo: Peterborough Regional College

Information and giveaways about being safe and being seen
Photo: Peterborough Regional College

Anti- bullying Week

This week has also been Anti-bullying week. Bullying can affect anyone but is not acceptable (and in some case is illegal) whatever age people are and whether inside or outside work/ College.

Anti-bullying and Safeguarding Resources

Bullying UK have a wealth of resources on cyber bullying, bullying at work and advice for young people about sexting, consent, abusive relationships, mental health and suicide.
The Anti-bullying alliance  also has information and advice. Results from a survey they ran highlighted that 97% of young people (11-16 year olds want adults to show more respect for each other. The NSPCC has a list of resources and reports if you are studying the topic of bullying/ abuse or are just interested.

The LRC subscribes to 3 online resources:- Childlink, Child Protection Online and Safeguarding Adults. All of these will have resources (news, reports, legislation about bullying and safeguarding) which you can use as a student, teacher or other member of staff. You will find links to these 3 resources on our Electronic Resources page. Use your network login and password to access either inside or outside college. Please ask staff in the LRC if you have any problems using these.

Google - tips and pitfalls

Using Google to search

A large number of us use Google as the search engine of choice, but is it really the best way to search for information for your academic work?

Google searches for information using algorithms - a set of automated rules which are applied as it trawls for keywords you've put in the search box. Google does not index everything and there is a lot of good information in the hidden web (not to be confused with the dark web!) which will never find it's way in to Google results. The hidden web includes contents of specific databases and collections held by organisations which haven't made these searchable by Google.

The problem is that Google does not exist first and foremost to bring back the information you require. It exists to make money in advertising revenue and so your top links are likely to be sponsored links (whether they are relevant or not). It will often put the most popular results first and you may not want the most popular - you want the most relevant.

Google tracks your use - either by your login or IP address and remembers what you searched for and this will influence what results are brought back in future. Google will assume you want information  from the country in which you are searching  and in the language in which you typed. It tries to mould it's results to you and so two people can get totally different results from the same search.

That said, its academic arm Google Scholar is a useful tool for students for finding articles and papers, but again does not give access to everything. Also, full text access will still often only be available with your University login.

For more information, see the relevant chapter in Phil Bradley's book Expert Internet Searching. available in the LRC.

Image CC0 https://pixabay.com/en/magnifying-glass-google-76520/

Tips for using Google effectively

• If you want to keep your searches private so your searches can't be tracked, you can apply relevant settings or delete search history.
• Use Advanced search to be more specific about your search. You will find this hidden in the Settings menu.
• Use Google Scholar if you want to search academic resources. You can set it just to search just for sources provided by ARU, for example, but you will need to log in to the ARU Digital library first to read the resources. You may want to try turning off the settings too to see everything else that is indexed.
• Use the image search for photographs and images.
• Put words in speech marks to keep them as a phrase "University of Peterborough", "health and safety"  "prime minister". Google tends to look for words next to each other first anyway, but using speech marks is standard for phrase searching in most databases.
• Save typing by using an asterisk (*) to indicate missing letters. Paint* will search for paint, paints, painting, paintings, painter, painters.
• Type the most important search word first in the search box.
• If you just want to search for sites from a particular country type site:.uk (before your keywords), for example, for UK sites. If you just want results from UK government sites, for example, use site:.gov.uk before your search term(s).

Further resources

Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a useful guide to searching Google (but setting Google Scholar up for MIT is not relevant unless you study there!).
The University of Bedfordshire have some useful Google Scholar tips on their library site.
Google itself has provided some video "power searching" courses which you can work through.