5.4.2 Develop and exchange relevant information to meet your purposes How does the way you communicate information affect the way you work? What opportunities do you have for developing or exploring different ways of working or sharing information using IT (e.g. using email, computer conferencing, video conferencing, web pages, sharing documents)? Depending on your requirements, you may need to consider factors such as the security, archiving and back-up of your data. What steps do you need to take to guard against the loss or misuse of your information? Can yo
5.4.1 Set up and use IT In using IT effectively you may need to learn how to use particular features of the software applications involved. In word processing, style sheets and templates help you set up consistent formats for essays, reports and other documents. In spreadsheets, macros – sets of instructions that can be repeated as often as necessary – can help you to perform complex numerical operations more easily. In databases, you may need to know how to set up structures so that you can store and retrieve i
5.2 Developing a strategy In developing a strategy for improving your IT skills you are aiming to: identify the opportunities you can use to develop and practise your IT skills; establish the outcomes you hope to achieve and targets for meeting them; identify the resources you might use for developing your skills, including people who might be able to help you as well as books, study guides, tutorials, specialist training, databases, libraries
4.4.3 Identify ways of further developing your communication skills Think about your overall level of communication skills and suggest areas where you feel you need to improve, based on the experience you have gained. You might find it useful to discuss with your tutor or another student or work colleague how you might do this. There may be changes you feel you need to make so that you can move forward, such as trying to extend the facilities and resources available to you, changing the way you study to make best use of the time you have, or focusing on impro
4.4.1 Organise and clearly present relevant information You need to know how to present information in ways that best suit your purpose, subject and audience, that is how to structure coherently what you say so that a sequence of ideas may be followed easily; how to use a range of techniques to help present information and support your argument (such as diagrams and models), and when to use technical vocabulary and conventions. Check that your work meets relevant guidelines and conventions. You may have guidelines about this at work and different
4.3.5 Adapt your strategy Often, plans run into difficulties because of unforeseen or changing circumstances. For example, it may have taken you longer than expected to get the information you needed, or just as you were ready to print off your final version of a report, the computer crashed. Plans are only a means to an end and frequently need to be modified. If you run into difficulties, think about how they affect the production of your immediate work and your overall goals. Do you need to modify your short-term pl
4.3.4 Monitor and critically reflect on your use of communication skills You need to know how to track and record your progress on your use of communication skills. Try to assess the overall quality of your written and oral work and the way you produced the work. Checklists and criteria provided as part of the project or assignment and those set out in the Bookmark can be very useful tools in helping you to assess for yourself precisely what you are doing and how well you are doing it. Unless you know what you are doing wrong, it is very difficult to improve.
4.3.3 Communicate relevant information A main outcome of this key skill is that you will be able to communicate complex information orally, visually and through writing. Complex subjects are those that include a number of ideas, some of which may be abstract, very detailed, difficult to follow or require you to deal with sensitive issues or the interpretation of others’ viewpoints. Communicating information at this level may involve using technical vocabulary, carefully structuring what you say and/or write, and using diag
3.10 Drawing ideas together This key skill has used a three-stage framework for developing your skills. By developing a strategy, monitoring your progress and evaluating your overall approach, you take an active role in your own learning. But learning does not necessarily follow a path of steady improvement, it involves change: revisiting ideas, seeing things from different perspectives, tackling things in different ways. You are unlikely to be able to complete your work by working through it from beginning to end
3.8 Evaluating strategy and presenting outcomes By now you will have found out about and sampled different resources for learning and used different ways to learn. But the structured approach used in this section is one of the main resources for developing and improving your other key skills. So how do you know if you have learned? How do you know if you have improved? How do you know if you are meeting the standard for improving your own learning and performance expected of someone doing a course in higher education or using higher
3.4.2 Using different ways and approaches to learn Always aim to select the way of learning that fits with what you intend to learn. If your goal is to improve your presentation skills, you need to prepare and practise presenting your work. If you need to relate theory to practise in your job, you need to spend time understanding how theory can relate to practice, perhaps by reviewing and discussing case studies. This may seem obvious but people often make wrong choices out of habit. There is a natural tendency to use ways we feel most famili
3.4.1 Manage your time effectively The aim here is to develop good work habits and time-management practices. These are often a matter of developing the right attitudes towards your work and towards your time. Here are 10 tips to help you look at your time management: establish goals and targets; work smarter, not harder; value your time; avoid attempting too much; carefully schedule activities, allowing time for emergencies, min
3.4 Monitoring progress Monitoring progress is about keeping track of what you are doing and how well you are doing it as you work towards your targets. It is about being able to make an assessment about yourself and being ‘self aware’ about your own capabilities, how you learn best, things that have helped you and so on. One problem in becoming more aware of yourself and making a self-assessment is that you may not know enough terms to describe yourself. Think of the first time you were asked to describe a pain
3.2.6 Achieving your goals Now that you have established what you intend to do and identified specific targets to achieve them, think about how you can meet your targets, taking into account what you are trying to do and looking carefully at the most effective way to do it. This might be by attending a training course or skills workshop, prioritising your time differently, taking an active part in e-tutorials, or checking out resources and giving yourself time to practise new ways of working. Take into account th
3.1 Introduction to improving own learning and performance This key skill is about helping you understand how you learn; think about how you can improve your own learning and performance, and consider how you might generalise the principles and processes for future learning. You saw in our discussion of ‘A framework for learning’, improving your learning and performance could be considered to be a ‘meta-skill’, that is the skill of learning how to learn. This section, then, is a little different from the other skills sections because im
2.8 Making the framework your own If there was a simple way to improve our own learning, we would all be geniuses by now. What this key skills approach tries to show is that learning is a complex process that draws on many skills and can be made more effective by becoming aware of what you are doing, how you are doing it and how well you are doing it. Once you are aware of what's going on, you can start to change things to suit your own learning style and the demands of the task or assignment you have to tackle. The nex
2.4.1 Keeping a Skills File As you work on your skills development, you are likely to find that you'll need several skill files so that you can keep a helpful frequent record or log of your learning. In this unit such a record is called a Skills File. Building up a Skills File as you go along will help you identify the skills you are using and how you are applying them to different tasks. You can also include your own reflective comments on how you think your work is progressing. The activities associated with each key
2.3.3 Evaluating your strategy and presenting outcomes This stage is about evaluating your strategy – what you've achieved and judging how well you achieved it-and presenting your work. An evaluation requires you to assess your overall strategy and work in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. Evaluating your strategy, however, is not simply describing what you have done, listing your successes, or even blaming yourself or others for things that didn't go according to plan. Evaluation is about considering how successful were the methods
2.3.2 Monitoring progress As the focus moves from preparation to action it is important to keep a check on what you are doing and how well you are doing it. Use your plan to help you review your progress, noting your successes and achievements as well as whether you met your deadlines and targets. Often, learning involves bringing together different activities, ways of studying and approaches to the subject. Consciously draw these different strands together, and don't be afraid to make changes where necessary to help
2.3.1 Developing a strategy A common feature of how effective people work is that they take time to prepare well. They know which aspects they are competent to do and those that they need to work on, plan carefully and identify possible sources of information and support. In other words they develop a strategy. A strategy is a plan for taking you towards and achieving a goal. The purpose of planning is to anticipate opportunities to learn that will improve your performance and develop your capabilities. A strategy
