Summary of course taken

I am in the second year of a part time Masters reading Health Psychology. This is a taught Masters which means I have lectures once a week and spend roughly twenty hours a week on research. I tend to work at home where I have my technologies set up in the way I want with a large 22 inch monitor and very fast desktop computer and printer because I enjoy surfing the internet and socialising on Facebook. I have found the course quite tough as there have been times when staff have not understood the impact of my disability. However, having been through do much in hospital I am determined to get a qualification so that I can help others in a similar situation.

Description of strategies used.

I use an ergonomic keyboard as I am always on the computer and it is more comfortable. I have also slowed the mouse movement across the desktop because I can't use it if it is too fast. My dexterity is crap! This also means I can't write by hand at all.

I have come up with lots of strategies for printing because I can't hand write. I can print addresses on envelopes - I measured one of my envelopes - developed a template in Word and now I have a collection of these templates for different situations. It makes life much easier. To make a template you just use a .dot file which is read only. I even fill in printed forms by making a template of the table used in the form and filling in the gaps.

I do not like clutter and make sure my Quick launch bar in Vista only has 4 items - Internet Explorer, Show desktop, Outlook and Mozilla Firefox. I find these are the most useful things.

I have also created a keyboard short cut for applications I use a lot for instance Ctrl + Alt + W loads Word and Ctrl + Alt + S fpr SPSS.

I like to record all my lectures so that if I need to I can listen to them again. One lecture I have listened to so many times, I could almost tell you it off by heart, becuase it related directly to the worst essay in the module!

I never get the lectures transcribed because I can usually get the main points down by using my laptop. The combination of PowerPoints downloaded from Blackboard, the recording and my outline works well. I do have problems if the lecturer puts PDF files onto Blackboard because I cannot annotate them in their original format. If you save them as text in Adobe Reader you lose all the pictures.

Our department's e-learning technologist was kind enough to make a video of some presentations and send me the CD later in the week. This made an enormous differnence to way I worked on that subject. It allowed me to go over it several times if I missed something and each time I see it I can pick up new points.

I had a fear of computers years and years ago when I was 8 or 9 and now when I see people who are worried about making mistakes I always say " the first thing you need to do is overcome your fear and keep practising!"