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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m a bit like you! I’m studying to become a High School science teacher, so I’m not in a technical program. My computer serves mostly as a typing machine. I switched 2 years ago and it wasn’t all smooth, but I’ll share some of the things I encountered and what I did.

    First problem I had, cloud sync. I used to be a a big OneDrive user and I wanted to sync everything with my drive as I used to be. There isn’t a very good program for syncing OneDrive. I bought a licence to InSync and it made it work flawlessly. Seriously good software! (nowadays I host my own Nextcloud server, but don’t start with that, it’s a lot of job for not a whole lot).

    Second problem was getting used to LibreOffice. Compared to Office, LO isn’t formated around pages, every text you write is considered “one big text” and then it calculates where to put its page breaks and everything. What does it change? Not a whole lot, but technically speaking, it’s not as good as a formatting tool as Word is. Doesn’t really matter if you aren’t a formatting freak like I am, but it took me a some time to get use to it. To get better with it, I recommend you to practice styles on it (text style and page style).

    Third problem, collaboration. I didn’t find a very good solution to it. What I do is I ask all my colleagues to write their parts online (Google Docs, MS Office Online,…) then once everything is done and perfectly written, I download it and open it in LO and do the final formatting. So I’m always the one doing the formatting. It’s important than when you give it back to your teachers, give it in a .PDF format. (Btw, unrelated, but look into Zotero, it’s a life saver)

    And a general tip and trick I could give you is to keep close a Windows/Mac machine (not with you at all times, but just something you access fairly easily if you plan in advance). There were a few times a professor mandated that we submitted the work in MS office format, and I didn’t want to risk it not being right, so I did it in LO and polished it in Office. That and I was asked to use a very specific, Windows only software, so having it was very useful.

    If you have other questions, don’t hesitate to ask!



  • Je prends l’idée de Kurzgesagt et je l’ai essayé un peu, sérieux ça fait du bien. (anecdotique, je sais)

    À la fin de chaque jour, prends 2-3 minutes pour expliciter 10 choses dont tu es reconnaissant. Ça peut être aussi simple que “le café que je me suis fait ce matin est particulièrement bon”.

    Au début ces difficiles, t’as l’impression que t’écris de la shnoute, mais ce que ça apporte c’est en aval. C’est-à-dire, ça te “force” à voir des gestes/des choses qui t’amène ce sentiment de reconnaissance.





  • This government (CAQ) has done many xenophobic thing. Restricting access to services in foreign languages to accommodate new immigrants is probably the best example of that. But this university thing, I don’t think it is. Most of the time, if you go and follow and Bachelor’s degree in another country, then you have to learn the language of that country because not every class is given in English only (of course there’s exceptions, but most of the time it’s like that). And you have to pay a hefty premium to go and educate yourself abroad.

    This situation is way different, studying at university of Toronto is 16 000$ if you are from Ontario and 17 000$ if you are from another province. So it was often cheaper for people to go and study in Québec. This fee raise doesn’t have anything to do with xenophobia or anything, this is merely bring the prices to the “market value”. Yes there’s a bit of language protectionism, but it’s not all that inconvenient, and as someone already said, just trying to learn French is probably sufficient to get around it.

    In short, I agree that there is xenophobic things that happens in Québec. I agree this provincial government doesn’t have a great track record on that front. But this change isn’t motivated by xenophobia, but other reasons. Up to you to decide if they’re valid or not in your opinion.


  • Something that people should keep in mind is that the fees were lower for those “out-of-province” students in Québec than in their own province.

    This fee raise basically brings it on par with what they would pay in their on province. One of the reasoning behind this law is that Québec shouldn’t be subsidizing other provinces way too expensive university system.

    If you are living in Québec, university fees are quite cheap, and this doesn’t change.

    The French vs English aspect is widely talked about, but not a whole lot is mentioned about the actual price hike.



  • Windows2000Srv@lemmy.catolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldWindows 11
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    1 year ago

    You do you, but I just hate MacOS way of tilling. When I’m tilling windows I’m generally multi-tasking and I need my dock to look at a third window from time to time. Having it in full screen renders this impossible and the animation for switching is sooooooooo slooooooow😅




  • I have no doubt that it can improve the class dynamic! Trust is always a good thing to have a good respect relation between a teacher and students!

    And I agree that having a notification and not being allowed to look at it is not useful, if I remember the study actually showed that. But what is definitely better is not being notified at all. To test that, they asked every student to leave the phone in the hallway, so in another room. I’m not talking about the feasibility (risk of theft and other things), but there is a clear impact.

    And I was in HS at the same time as you, but honestly, the class dynamic today is way different than it used to be even less then 10 years ago. It surprised me during my internship! I actually had the same policy as your teacher (you can use your phone, respectfully), but clearly I didn’t master it… 😅


  • In one of my class to become an high school teacher, we were thought about some best practices for learning and studying on your own.

    Just the fact that you can see your phone (not the screen, just the body) is actively harming your ability to learn. It’s because phone are machines to notify you and just seeing, or even feeling it in your pocket, unconsciously makes you alert to its notifications.

    The professor after that went on to say that, if you’re going to use a laptop, use it to actually take note, nothing else. Since the screen is so big, lots of people can see it, and scrolling through Facebook (or other) impacts your ability to listen (duh, you’re doing something else), but also to the others, because it take the attention away from the class, to the screen of the laptop, even if it isn’t your laptop. So even Uni student might have to think about how they use their devices…

    The best thing about that class was that everything was back with studies! So this isn’t just the teacher saying “screw technology!”, but actual science!