Atomic Learning available for USF Students!

Have you ever enrolled into a class at school only to find out that you had to learn a new software program. Or have you been working in excel and do not know how to create list headers for columns?  The University of South Florida has provided a possible solution to these kinds of tech worries. According to the USF learning commons blog, USF has purchased the services of Atomic Learning for its students.  Atomic Learning is a website for educators and students learn about new software and technology that may be used in education. The company, founded by educators has been in existence for the past decade providing step by step screencast tutorials. Teachers and students can find videos that are tutorials, project based, grouped by workshop type (blogging, searching the web, etc.) or by state standards and subjects.

Professors and students can access the Atomic Learning Resources via their Blackboard page. After logging into Blackboard, you must add the module to your page.

Click add module

You will then be presented with a list of modules that can be added to the page for easy access to their content. Find the Atomic Learning module and check it off. Click the Submit button to confirm the changes.

Check the Atomic Learning box

The module should now appear on your front page. Clicking the link will sign you into the university’s account and provide you access to the tutorials and workshops on the atomic learning website.

Click Atomic Learning, Now Available

Once you are in the website you can begin searching for tutorials and workshops to increase your knowledge of a program or application, or you can choose workshops for ideas of technology that you can include in your classes and lessons.

This is a resource for the students and faculty wishing to learn more about educational technology and specific applications.  USF also purchased the assistive technology package which includes programs such as Boardmaker 6, JAWS 9, Overboard, WordQ, SpeakQ, and IntelliKeys.  There are also programs for the developing researcher such as Atlas T.I and SPSS(v.14). This is a place to find tutorials for the most common resources used in education.

While this site does have a lot of programs it does not have everything that can be used in education or the tutorials are a little dated. For example it provides tutorials on Atlas T.I.(v.5) which is good for data collection and analysis of qualitative research but does not have tutorials on SAS or the latest SPSS which are used in quantitative research as well as some other programs that may be used in other colleges and departments on campus. There are even tutorials on a few free resources such as Audacity (audio editing software) and Picasa (photo managing software). Remember when browsing the collection, it is meant to teach and train educators, thus not every latest and greatest application will be taught since they are not relevant to education.