Can you identify the films/ books/ productions portrayed around the different areas in the LRC? Well done to the LRC staff who put in a lot of time (often their own) and thought to creating these.
Last day for entries are early Friday (14th) so do come in and take part for the chance to win a prize.
As a taster, have a look at the following selection to see if you can guess what they portray.
At the latest Staff Student Liaison Committee some of the student reps requested some help with time management. This is a life skill relevant to everyone whatever their role. We all seem so busy and have trouble fitting everything in to our week. We've put together some tips and resources you might find useful.
First of all how about finding out how good you are at managing your time using this short quiz? This will help you reflect on how/ whether you manage your time.
Tips and online resources
Plan your week - work out how you typically use your time in a standard week using ARU's weekly time tracker. You can then also use their weekly and termly planners (go to the bottom of the webpage) to plan ahead. See also their time management guide on the Getting Organised page of their Study Skills Plus section.
List your activities - there can be a satisfaction in listing jobs and ticking them off. In an ideal world you do your thinking and planning now and then next week you just do what you've scheduled (or at least you don't spend so much time thinking about what you should be doing). In your time tracker you will have identified how much time is needed for which activity so you can spread your activities out over a week realistically in your planner.
Prioritise your activities/ tasks -Identify which tasks are urgent, which are important, which are optional and which aren't important. If something is difficult (perhaps you just don't want to do it) or needs more attention, allocate time when you are freshest or have the most energy not when you are likely to be tired. See Skills you Need's Priority Matrix.
Don't procrastinate or get distracted - go to the labels on the right and choose study skills and you should find a post we did on procrastination in June 2017. Turn your phone off, work somewhere where there aren't things around to distract you (you may find working in the LRC may be a suitable environment for you to work in with less distractions).
Other resources
The Learn Higher website has various short activities you can do to help with time management.
If you prefer watching videos to learn see the BBC Skillswise video on time management.
Alternatively, you may find this video useful:
There are various TED talks you can watch too of course (but do you have the time?).
See below for photos from our Fantastic Beasts event last week.
Fantastic Beasts craft stall provided by Youth Centre
Photo: Peterborough Regional College
Photograph your Pet competition
Photo: Peterborough Regional College
Animal Care stall (with stick insects etc.)
Photo: Peterborough Regional College
Owl from the Raptor Foundation
Photo:Peterborough Regional College
Thanks to Hair and Beauty students for their face painting creations of fantastic beasts and to catering students for making and selling refreshments. The LRC tombola raised £75 for Wood Green Animal Shelter. Thank you everyone and to the LRC assistants who planned and organised it.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
Peterborough Regional College is fortunate to have en experienced careers adviser to help all of you looking to apply to study in Higher Education next year. Level 3 and Access students should all have had a visit from Matt about writing your personal statement and using OSCAR to do this.
For this half term, the LRC is supplementing the help given by your tutor and the careers department by offering appointments to those of you who want some initial help with getting on to OSCAR and finding your way around it. We will not be offering careers advice or checking the content of your personal statement but hopefully we can help you make sure that you have everything ready for when you have your appointment with a Careers Adviser. You should ask your tutor if you need subject-related information.
Booking an appointment
The LRC will offer 20 minute OSCAR appointments at these times only:
Tuesdays at 15:00, 15:20, 15:40
Wednesdays at 15:00, 15:20, 15:40
Thursdays at 10:40, 11:00, 11:20
Please book in advance (these are not drop-in sessions) by phoning or emailing the LRC or by coming in and booking with a member of staff.
You will need to have filled in your OSCAR privacy statement form first, handed it in to the careers office and been given your OSCAR login.
A few resources about going to University and writing Personal Statements (other than OSCAR).
UCAS has a YouTube channel with numerous videos about applying to University.
Many Universities have also produced their own guides to writing a Personal Statement so check out their websites too.
Online careers information - eCLIPS
Whether you are going to University or not, you have access to an online resource full of information about different careers and jobs which you may be interested in. This is available from Careers pages on Moodle or from the Electronic Resources page found under the LRC menu tab. You will find the login information here too.
