Monday, June 10, 2013

Printing in the New iCollege



 No doubt we will discover many things about Desire2Learn, the new platform for iCollege, in the weeks and months ahead.  One thing discovered by a few of the staff is that printing is a bit different now.

When a pdf displayed in a content frame of the old iCollege, we instructed students to use the print icon/tool at the top of the frame rather than using a File>Print command.  Remember how, if they didn't follow those directions, they would often print a blank (or almost blank) page? Well, those directions are SO last season. (Wink)

 Here's the new way--and it's different for each type of content:
  1. A .docx opens in MS Word in a new window which is that obviously outside of iCollege. For this content, simply use the file>print function to send the document to Pharos.
  2. A .pdf opens within the content frame in iCollege, but it's actually being opened by an Adobe Reader; therefore to print, we need to look for the tools within that application.  Usually there is a floating toolbar, the kind that appears when we want to print a .pdf from one of the databases. To see it, just wiggle (very technical term) the mouse in the lower section of the document. Another option is to put the cursor within the document, right click, and give the print command from there. Either way works to send the document to Pharos.
  3. If the instructor typed content directly into iCollege using the WYSIWYG .html editor, then use the print icon on the top of the content frame to print that page in Pharos.
Hope this helps avoid some frustration for you and the students.   Please let me know of other quandaries about the new iCollege so we can investigate and help each other.




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