Overview of Writing, Reading, and Language Center

First of all, what do we do in a writing, reading, and language center? Well, before we even get to that, I want to tell you how many of us there are at the college. Because you all are, this class is associated with Germantown, but that doesn't mean you're going to take all your classes associated with the Germantown campus. So if I can let it forward for me. There's three writing, reading, and language centers at the college. There's one basically on each campus. And each one has both in-person. and online tutoring. So depending on whether you take in-person classes, whether you take online classes, whether you're taking one of these structured remote classes, there's always a writing center that is able to help you. And even if you are taking most of your classes on one campus, if you happen to be physically on the other campus for another reason, you can go to that writing center. You don't have to go to the writing center that is on your class on your normal campus. We recommend that you try and use that one just so OneWriting Center doesn't get overrun, but they're all available to you. I'm also going to make sure that I should remember that I have my chat. I have everything on my screens. I also like to tell you guys the hours that we're open because since we're doing hybrid services right now, we're doing some things in person and some things online, the hours are a little bit different. Our virtual hours were open pretty long. We're open Mondays through Thursdays 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Fridays 8 to 4, and Saturdays 10 to 2. What this means is that during these hours usually there's online tutoring available and there's a my slide just automatically forward itself that was rude of it. There there's always there's a tutor available and there is a staff member available to answer questions. Our in-person hours are slightly different. They're a little bit more complicated. So how I describe them is generally around midday on Monday, Thursdays, and Fridays we have tutors available in person. Wednesdays we have tutors available in the afternoon and evening, and Tuesdays are our long day. So there's not necessarily tutors available every single hour of these days, but within these hours. We also have a computer lab, so if you ever have technological difficulties and need to use have access to a computer you can make a reservation for that. But now I'm going to get into some of the specific things. There's lots of ways to contact us and I'll come. How can tutoring help you? Why does this even exist? The main thing we do in the Writing, Reading, and Language Center is one-on-one tutoring. What is that? That means that basically you meet with a tutor who is either a faculty member or a staff member who has the same qualifications as a faculty member. and talk about your writing. And I look really excited when I say that because it's one of my favorite things to do. That's why I do this job is I want to help people improve their writing, reading, communication skills. And it can be any part of your assignment. You can come in if you're having trouble getting started and you have that wonderful assignment from Professor Carey, but you're just you're having trouble coming up with ideas. So you can come in for brainstorming. My thing is automatically boarding itself and I don't know why, so I apologize as I fight it today. You can come in for help with outlining. If you are, have already written something, but you want to make sure that your ideas are making sense or that your grammar is making sense or you're, you know you've gotten a lot of feedback on one specific grammar thing and you're working really hard on it and you want to make sure that you're doing it right before you hand it in. that's a great time to come in. If you have gotten feedback from Professor Carey and you're working on applying that feedback to a new draft and you want to talk about it with someone else and get another perspective, that's a great time to come in. Basically, any time is a good time to talk with a tutor because any time in the writing process, we can help you with what you're working on. I also want to say, because this might be your first time you guys are being introduced for us, as you go on with your academic career at MC, this isn't just for your English classes, this isn't just for your writing classes, this is for any class you take that has writing as part of it. So we see a lot of students who are taking ELAP classes, we see a lot of students who are taking English classes, but we also see students who are taking Psychology or who are taking Biology. We can't necessarily help with the content, but we can help make sure that your ideas are clear and that you're communicating what you want to communicate and really help you develop those strong written communication skills. So during this point, because we're in our hybrid mode, we're part on campus and part online, there's three kinds of tutoring available. So two of them are virtual, they're online, and then there's also in-person tutoring. And in-person tutoring is basically what it sounds like. It's on campus, you meet with a tutor face-to-face, we ask that you come, that if you're coming to campus, you have to do the health assessment and you need to wear a mask the whole time. we also ask that you bring two copies of your paper to the appointment. If you're not able to print out your paper or you're having difficulty with that, just let us know and come 10 minutes early and we will help you with that. Now, since you guys are all online right now, you might prefer to do the online tutoring, which there's two kinds of online tutoring. The one that's closest to in-person tutoring is what we call live video text chat. It's what we call synchronous, which means you're speaking with the tutor live. you can use a chat box or you can use a video chat, very similar to Zoom but it's slightly different, that there's a workspace for your, what's it called, for your paper. And all you need to be able to do for to use that is to copy and paste your paper and assignment sheet into our interface. So it does work best if you're working on something like a laptop computer, a desktop computer, a large tablet. It doesn't work super well if you're on a phone, unfortunately, just because you need bigger screen space. The other kind of online tutoring is what we call written feedback. This works best if you already have something written because what you do is you upload what you've written to the appointment and hopefully your assignment sheet as well, so the tutor knows what you're being asked to do. And you don't actually speak directly to the tutor. What the tutor does is they download the paper. They read through it. They look at, you know, when you make your appointment, you give them some ideas of what your concerns are. And they'll look at those things. They might look at some other things, depending on the time they have. And then they'll actually write you feedback. So you'll get a little letter at the beginning of your assignment going, hey, thank you so much for submitting this. I enjoyed reading it. That's usually what I write, because I always enjoy reading what you guys send in. And... then some kind of, here's the things that I noticed, here's what you worked on, and then you'll have comments in the paper, very similar to what you'll get feedback from your professor, but this is another perspective and additional feedback, which is great because feedback is the best thing ever. It's how we improve. You need to be able to upload your paper to the appointment, and I'm going to show you guys how to make appointments as well. Don't worry about that. She keeps talking about how to make appointments. How do we do that? I'm going to show you. Because this can work, you just have to attach the paper, it can work from a phone. So if you're limited on your technological devices, this is a great way to still get some feedback. Now, I've already gotten into this, what tutoring is best for you. So written feedback works best for revising outlines and essays, grammar and punctuation, and things like that where you can give your paper to someone and they can look at it and review it. And it works with kind of any technological device. The live video or text chat works best. It works really for any stage. It's great if you want to brainstorm. It's great if you're at the very end. It's great for in the middle, but you do need something with a larger screen, whether it's a laptop or a desktop or some tablets. And in-person tutoring, you just need to be able to bring your paper and show up and be healthy when you come because you want to keep everyone safe. What do you need for tutoring? I get this question a lot. What do I need? What do I need? I mean, first of all, you have to be a current MC student, but you guys already got that one checked. Good job. First thing checked off. When you sign up, you'll be asked to tell us what your class is and your professor's name. You need to bring your work and your assignment sheet. For written feedback, you have to upload your paper and your assignment sheet before the appointment starts. And for live video or text chat, you just have to be able to copy and paste it into the. line interface. For in-person tutoring, we ask that you either bring those two copies, let us know that you're not able to print them out so we can help you print them out, or bring a copy for yourself and upload one before you come. That way we can print one out before you arrive. And that's just so that the tutor can have their own copy and you don't have to be passing paper. That's just an additional safety measure we have at this point. That won't remain true forever. And you also have to sign up using our online system, which I'm going to show you in a second. If you ever have trouble with us though, you should be able to email us because don't let technology stop you from getting help. We are here to help you get over that hurdle as well. Other things you should know. You can sign up from 20 minutes to seven days in advance. So it's the sort of thing that if you get out of class at 11 30, you can make an appointment for noon. If it's the sort of thing where today is Wednesday, you can make an appointment for next Wednesday. So if you're planning far in advance, my thing keeps moving on, it's very rude. If you're planning in advance, then you can really get ahead on your assignments and we're going to talk about that at some point. I'm going to come back in the semester at some point to talk about time management and that's really important as we get into exams and midterms and those sorts of times because we get very busy and right if you don't schedule in advance you might not be able to see someone. Appointments are scheduled on the hour. They last for 45 minutes and then the last 15 minutes are for the tutor to fill out a report form and talk about what you did. You can have more than one appointment per day. My thing is auto playing for me and I don't know how to get it to stop. So I apologize for my technical difficulties. You can have more than one appointment per day, but they can't be back to back. And you should either work on different assignments or make process on the assignment between sessions. It's very likely that we'll have to limit appointments to one per day once midterms and finals get here or earlier, depending on how busy you get. Now, if you miss or cancel appointments, I'm going to. try and see if I can pause this somehow. No, it's not working. Somehow I've set up autoplay on my slides and I never do that so I don't know how to turn it off. I don't know how this happens. I can pause and you can take a moment to try to figure it out if you want to. Yeah, so just being nice. I'll pause though. I have up to two per day but they do get limited during busy times. And so part of that as well is that if you miss or cancel an appointment on the same day three times, you have to meet with me before you can make another appointment. So you temporarily lose appointment privileges. And the reason we do that, it's not supposed to be a punishment. It's that if there's a lot of people who need appointments and you're missing appointments, then that's taking that time away from someone because no one else can sign up for that time. And usually what I see when someone is signing up for a lot of appointments and canceling them is we need to have a talk about time management and how best to use the center so that you get the help you need and that you're planning your projects appropriately. So meeting with me, obviously, I'm a very scary person. I'm not scary at all. I've tried to be scary at points in my life and I can't be. It's a great time for us to have a conversation and just make sure that we can make sure that you're using the center in a way that's going to be successful for you. And also that. other people can make appointments as well. So not a very scary thing. All right. So however, you can cancel an appointment up to 24 hours in advance with no penalty. So if you had an appointment tomorrow and you realized, you know what, I have too much going on with my life today, I'm not going to be done with my assignment in time to go to that appointment, you can cancel it and that's fine. It's only if you waited until tomorrow to cancel it that it would count. And we have full policies online and I'm going to show you how to find all those policies. So, big one, how do I sign up? She keeps talking about a scheduling system, but how does it look like? She hasn't shown it to us. This is the scariest bit because more technology, what? So I'm going to hide my slides now, now that I've figured out how to use them, and I'm going to show you our scheduling system. I'm also going to copy and paste our link into the chat. I strongly recommend, you know, opening this up and saving it as a bookmark. It's so you never have to lose it. When you open up a Learning Center link, all of the Learning Centers use a system called WC Online. They all have MyWCOnline in the link. Double check that you're on the right place with this URL. You guys are seeing my screen, right? Yes. Can you give that to me? Yes. Okay. I'm always worried things are going to stop working on me. So double check that you are on the right learning center, the right campus. If this looks familiar, that's because we have an orientation video, which I'm currently updating for the in-person. You guys were the first to see the in-person slides. And once that is finished, that'll get posted here. And- will have all the information that I'm giving you now. So you don't have to remember it because I know it's a lot of information and I would forget it. The reason I have the slides is because it's a lot of information and it helps me remember. Even when you're on this first page, all the information that you need to successfully make an appointment is here. You don't have to log in yet. We have what kind of tutoring is available, if you forget. We have links to our policies and information. We have another link to our orientation video, and we have our contact information. So if you ever have trouble using our system or getting an appointment, You can email us, you can call us, and you can also text us on these numbers. So whenever we have our virtual hours, which is most of the day, someone is monitoring these things and can answer your questions. If you contact us outside of hours, we'll just get back to you the first thing the next day. Now the first time you use our system, you do have to register for an account. This is separate from your MyMC account. It's entirely different. So You only have to log in here. You don't have to go through MyMC. To make an account, you click on this bit where it says first visit, register for an account. And it's a fairly standard online form, and I'm hoping that after this last year where most so much of life has gone online, a lot of us are more familiar with it, but I always like to show people. For the email address, you have to use your Montgomery College email address. If you put in anything different, it won't work. make sure you've spelled Montgomery College correctly and you've put an edu. I often accidentally misspell Montgomery College because I'm typing too quickly, so if there's an error always double check that. We ask your first name, your family name, and your m number. We also ask your first language because we always find that really interesting, and you can include your telephone number, and I strongly recommend it's not required, but I recommend you include your telephone number because that way if you're if you have an online appointment, if you have a live video one, if you're late, the tutor will contact us and be like, hey, it's five minutes into my appointment. My student hasn't shown up. And what we'll do is we will call you and be like, hey, is everything okay? Are you having trouble with the technology? And then you go, yes, I can't get in. And then we'll help you get in. And then you don't have to worry about accidentally missing your appointment because technology was being mean. So I strongly recommend putting in your telephone number. You have to choose a password. I recommend making it different from your MyMC password because these aren't connected. There's also a section where you can put in your phone number again for text messaging. We have a waitlist system and when things get really busy at the end of the semester or the middle of the semester, you can get on a waiting list and if an appointment opens up, everyone on the waitlist will get a text message. and an email if they put their phone number in here. If you don't put your phone number in here, you'll only get a text message. So if you want to make sure you can get an appointment during really busy times, put your phone number in here. And then at the bottom, just click complete registration. I'm going to go back and I'm going to log in. I made myself a student account. So I put in my email address, I put in my password, and I'm going to click the kind of tutoring I want. virtual tutoring, computer reservations, which just books your computer in our computer lab, in-person, and in-person tutoring. I'm going to choose virtual tutoring, and I also recommend clicking stay logged in so it'll remember you for a while. All right, once you've logged in, there's a lot of friendly information. I know no one ever reads this text box, but it is here. It reminds you what kind of tutoring is available on this schedule. It reminds you which schedule you're on and what center you're looking at. because if you've accidentally logged into another center, you want to make sure you're going to the right place, especially if you're planning to do something in person. We also always again have a link to our policies and we have a link to our orientation video in case you want to double check any of those and our contact information. There's contact our contact information on every page so if you're ever having technical difficulties or just have a question, you can contact us. You don't have to sit there all alone and figure out how do I do this. It's a pretty straightforward visual system. The times when the, I think someone's unmuted. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you. The times when someone's not available is this dark purple color. The times when someone else has booked an appointment is a dark blue. An appointment that's unavailable is gray. An appointment that's available is white. If you book an appointment, it's a bright, happy yellow. So anything that you see in a bright, happy yellow is your appointment. All you have to do to book an appointment is click. on the white spot that you want. An appointment form will come up. You have to choose between whether you want live video or written feedback. You put in the course, ELaw 980. You put in the instructor, Professor Kerry Shaw. You put in the campus, in our case it would be Germantown, and the assignment. This can be descriptive, it can be assignment one, whatever you think. We have a little drop down that asks you what you want to work on today. you know, if you're brainstorming, if you're planning, if you're writing that outline, you choose plan. If you're working on something you've already written, you'd be revising content. If it's a specific grammar thing, you put grammar, and then we also have other. We also have this nice box of what would you like the tutor to focus on. This is a place for you to give your tutor more information. Our tutors help with all classes, so they might not be familiar with your specific assignment or what you're being asked to do. or what your concerns are. So this is a great place to say, you know, to your professor, to the tutor, if you choose something like grammar, saying, you know, I'm working on fixing run-on sentences, or I'm working on my subordinating clauses, or I need help making sure that my sentence order is working. So that's a place where you can give more specific details. The last button is, do you want this report? sent to your professor. You can say yes or no. It is entirely up to you. But I know Professor Carey loves to see you all come here. So if you say yes, we will send the report form that the tutor writes up on to her and she will be very excited. The report forms are not a judging thing, by the way. All they say is, you know, this is what the student brought in, this is what you brought in. this is what we worked on together or this is what I reviewed if it was written feedback. And then we have a section for here's what I recommend, here's what we discussed that be the next steps. So it really is to kind of just be like here's what we did, here's where we're going, very productive sort of thing. The last bit is if you're doing a written feedback session or a in-person tutoring session, you have to choose upload a file. It attaches just like it would to a like an email, so you just choose the file there. I'm going to close this window. Now, if you realize that you've gotten on to the wrong kind of schedule, there's a drop down up here where you can be like, oh, I actually wanted in-person tutoring, so you can go and choose that, and it looks the same thing. It just says in-person tutoring, and on the appointment form looks all the same, but you don't have to choose what kind of tutoring is because there's only one kind of tutoring for this schedule. It's in-person. If you find that you have technological issues and you need to use a computer while on campus and you want to come use us, there's lots of different places where you can use computer labs, but we do have some computer labs available. We have reservations. We request that people make the reservations, you know, 20 minutes in advance. If you are having full technological difficulties, you can call us and we can make this appointment for you. This is really just so we know who's coming into the center. You reserve it for two hours, but you don't have to come at the beginning of those two hours. You can show up anytime during those two hours and it's just there waiting for you. All right, I'm going to pull my slides back up because that's the showing you the scheduling system. Oh, I did want to show you one other thing. If you forget everything I've told you and you've lost the link to make the scheduling appointment, The easiest way to find us is to go to the main montgomerycollege.edu website and literally put in WRL in the search. If you put in WRL, which stands for writing, reading, and language, our center is the first one because we're alphabetically Germantown the first. So the first result is the Germantown Writing, Reading, and Language Center. You click on that and we have all the information you need. My contact information is right there if you ever want to contact me directly. And our online scheduling system and our phone numbers are all there. So if you ever lose any of this information, you just go to the main MC website and put in WRL and we're the first search. And it makes my life so much easier when I tell you. All right, so the last few things, I always like to tell you a few more things about how the WRAL Center can help you, is we also have workshops on essay writing, reading skills, test taking, and research, and I'll show you how to access those in a second. This semester, we also have what we call, what we're calling the writing groups, and I'm going to talk about that in a second too. We also have handouts and links to writing and reading resources, so if you just want a handout, if you just want a little... additional information, we can send you that. And we can give you technical help with WC Online, with eEnglish and My English Lab, other related WRL Center software. And for that technical help, you just call us or email us. You don't need to make an appointment for that. It's the sort of thing where all the staff are busy, we'll make an appointment and call you back. Also, when you guys are eventually looking forward to this point in your academic career, we help with scholarship and transfer essays. Already thinking about next steps, we can help you work on those scholarship and transfer essays, particularly since they can sometimes be a very different and challenging kind of writing. I think they're really fun to write, but there also can be, you know, the first time you do it, it can be a new experience. So we will help with those. Put that in the back of your mind when you're ready to look at scholarships and you're ready to think, start thinking about transfer. Put in the notes. a note, I'm going to go to the Writing, Reading, and Language Center to get some feedback on this. Again, I always just like to put up a slide with our contact information. We have two different phone numbers that you can always access us remotely. The reason we do that is just if we're talking to someone on one, you won't get a busy signal, so you can just call us on the other. Both of those also forward to our on-campus number, so don't worry if you want to call us on campus directly when you know that we are open on campus. you can do that, but if you call the remote numbers that will get forwarded to on campus if someone is, if we're here. We also have our shared email address at germantownwrlc at montgomerycollege.edu. So fairly, fairly easy to remember email address, I hope. So the other thing I wanted to show you is our workshops. So to find our workshops, we actually have a workshop series that we share with the other learning centers. So I'm on the main Montgomery College website and I'm going to put learning centers into this. The fastest way to find anything on this website is to search. Learning centers is the first option. I'm going to click on that and I'm going to scroll down to where it says workshops and we have a pdf with our workshop series up here. And so, for example, we have, oh, since I was just talking about transfer and scholarship essays, in November, we have a workshop on transfer and scholarship essays. It's next week? It's next week. Next week, we have workshops on writing essentials and reading essentials. In October, a staff member from the Germantown Writing, Reading, and Language Center is doing one on common grammar and punctuation mistakes, which can be a often is a very popular workshop because it helps us really tackle some of those things that all English language learners, whether you grew up speaking it or you just started learning it, can struggle with. Another thing that we have, and I'm going to, is it on this page or is it on a different page? It's on a different page. So if I'm going, I'm going to go to our virtual tutoring page. We have, um, Through the WRLC, the three of us, this fall we have what we're calling the writing groups. There's going to be three writing groups that are focused on different topics relating to Black, Latinx, and Asian students, focusing on literature, experience, writing about your own experiences. I'm really excited for them. I've heard amazing things coming out of these different groups. And so if... They're open to all students. I think they're only a commitment of maybe one hour once a week or two hours every other couple of weeks. It depends on the group that's happening and if you participate consistently in them. I'm still finding out the details but I hear there's a small stipend and they'll pay for some of the books that for the books that are required for the writing groups and yes possibly Grubhub gift cards. because who doesn't like food? Don't hold me to that, but I'm pretty sure that's happening, and I'm in a meeting tomorrow about it, and I'm really hoping that's happening. I'm also going to copy that link into the chat, so if you're interested in those sorts of things, you can join that. It's going to be a really great place to kind of meet people from across the college and be exposed to a lot of people at different languages, different language backgrounds, different levels of skill, and a great place to kind of explore your skills in these topics in a kind of safe situation.

There's one basically on each campus. And each one has both in-person. and online tutoring.

So depending on whether you take in-person classes, whether you take online classes, whether you're taking one of these structured remote classes, there's always a writing center that is able to help you. And even if you are taking most of your classes on one campus, if you happen to be physically on the other campus for another reason, you can go to that writing center. You don't have to go to the writing center that is on your class on your normal campus.

We recommend that you try and use that one just so OneWriting Center doesn't get overrun, but they're all available to you. I'm also going to make sure that I should remember that I have my chat. I have everything on my screens.

I also like to tell you guys the hours that we're open because since we're doing hybrid services right now, we're doing some things in person and some things online, the hours are a little bit different. Our virtual hours were open pretty long. We're open Mondays through Thursdays 9 a.m.

to 8 p.m., Fridays 8 to 4, and Saturdays 10 to 2. What this means is that during these hours usually there's online tutoring available and there's a my slide just automatically forward itself that was rude of it. There there's always there's a tutor available and there is a staff member available to answer questions. Our in-person hours are slightly different. They're a little bit more complicated.

So how I describe them is generally around midday on Monday, Thursdays, and Fridays we have tutors available in person. Wednesdays we have tutors available in the afternoon and evening, and Tuesdays are our long day. So there's not necessarily tutors available every single hour of these days, but within these hours. We also have a computer lab, so if you ever have technological difficulties and need to use have access to a computer you can make a reservation for that.

But now I'm going to get into some of the specific things. There's lots of ways to contact us and I'll come. How can tutoring help you? Why does this even exist? The main thing we do in the Writing, Reading, and Language Center is one-on-one tutoring.

What is that? That means that basically you meet with a tutor who is either a faculty member or a staff member who has the same qualifications as a faculty member. and talk about your writing. And I look really excited when I say that because it's one of my favorite things to do.

That's why I do this job is I want to help people improve their writing, reading, communication skills. And it can be any part of your assignment. You can come in if you're having trouble getting started and you have that wonderful assignment from Professor Carey, but you're just you're having trouble coming up with ideas. So you can come in for brainstorming.

My thing is automatically boarding itself and I don't know why, so I apologize as I fight it today. You can come in for help with outlining. If you are, have already written something, but you want to make sure that your ideas are making sense or that your grammar is making sense or you're, you know you've gotten a lot of feedback on one specific grammar thing and you're working really hard on it and you want to make sure that you're doing it right before you hand it in. that's a great time to come in.

If you have gotten feedback from Professor Carey and you're working on applying that feedback to a new draft and you want to talk about it with someone else and get another perspective, that's a great time to come in. Basically, any time is a good time to talk with a tutor because any time in the writing process, we can help you with what you're working on. I also want to say, because this might be your first time you guys are being introduced for us, as you go on with your academic career at MC, this isn't just for your English classes, this isn't just for your writing classes, this is for any class you take that has writing as part of it.

So we see a lot of students who are taking ELAP classes, we see a lot of students who are taking English classes, but we also see students who are taking Psychology or who are taking Biology. We can't necessarily help with the content, but we can help make sure that your ideas are clear and that you're communicating what you want to communicate and really help you develop those strong written communication skills. So during this point, because we're in our hybrid mode, we're part on campus and part online, there's three kinds of tutoring available. So two of them are virtual, they're online, and then there's also in-person tutoring.

And in-person tutoring is basically what it sounds like. It's on campus, you meet with a tutor face-to-face, we ask that you come, that if you're coming to campus, you have to do the health assessment and you need to wear a mask the whole time. we also ask that you bring two copies of your paper to the appointment.

If you're not able to print out your paper or you're having difficulty with that, just let us know and come 10 minutes early and we will help you with that. Now, since you guys are all online right now, you might prefer to do the online tutoring, which there's two kinds of online tutoring. The one that's closest to in-person tutoring is what we call live video text chat.

It's what we call synchronous, which means you're speaking with the tutor live. you can use a chat box or you can use a video chat, very similar to Zoom but it's slightly different, that there's a workspace for your, what's it called, for your paper. And all you need to be able to do for to use that is to copy and paste your paper and assignment sheet into our interface.

So it does work best if you're working on something like a laptop computer, a desktop computer, a large tablet. It doesn't work super well if you're on a phone, unfortunately, just because you need bigger screen space. The other kind of online tutoring is what we call written feedback. This works best if you already have something written because what you do is you upload what you've written to the appointment and hopefully your assignment sheet as well, so the tutor knows what you're being asked to do. And you don't actually speak directly to the tutor.

What the tutor does is they download the paper. They read through it. They look at, you know, when you make your appointment, you give them some ideas of what your concerns are. And they'll look at those things.

They might look at some other things, depending on the time they have. And then they'll actually write you feedback. So you'll get a little letter at the beginning of your assignment going, hey, thank you so much for submitting this.

I enjoyed reading it. That's usually what I write, because I always enjoy reading what you guys send in. And...

then some kind of, here's the things that I noticed, here's what you worked on, and then you'll have comments in the paper, very similar to what you'll get feedback from your professor, but this is another perspective and additional feedback, which is great because feedback is the best thing ever. It's how we improve. You need to be able to upload your paper to the appointment, and I'm going to show you guys how to make appointments as well. Don't worry about that. She keeps talking about how to make appointments.

How do we do that? I'm going to show you. Because this can work, you just have to attach the paper, it can work from a phone.

So if you're limited on your technological devices, this is a great way to still get some feedback. Now, I've already gotten into this, what tutoring is best for you. So written feedback works best for revising outlines and essays, grammar and punctuation, and things like that where you can give your paper to someone and they can look at it and review it. And it works with kind of any technological device.

The live video or text chat works best. It works really for any stage. It's great if you want to brainstorm.

It's great if you're at the very end. It's great for in the middle, but you do need something with a larger screen, whether it's a laptop or a desktop or some tablets. And in-person tutoring, you just need to be able to bring your paper and show up and be healthy when you come because you want to keep everyone safe. What do you need for tutoring?

I get this question a lot. What do I need? What do I need?

I mean, first of all, you have to be a current MC student, but you guys already got that one checked. Good job. First thing checked off.

When you sign up, you'll be asked to tell us what your class is and your professor's name. You need to bring your work and your assignment sheet. For written feedback, you have to upload your paper and your assignment sheet before the appointment starts.

And for live video or text chat, you just have to be able to copy and paste it into the. line interface. For in-person tutoring, we ask that you either bring those two copies, let us know that you're not able to print them out so we can help you print them out, or bring a copy for yourself and upload one before you come.

That way we can print one out before you arrive. And that's just so that the tutor can have their own copy and you don't have to be passing paper. That's just an additional safety measure we have at this point.

That won't remain true forever. And you also have to sign up using our online system, which I'm going to show you in a second. If you ever have trouble with us though, you should be able to email us because don't let technology stop you from getting help.

We are here to help you get over that hurdle as well. Other things you should know. You can sign up from 20 minutes to seven days in advance. So it's the sort of thing that if you get out of class at 11 30, you can make an appointment for noon. If it's the sort of thing where today is Wednesday, you can make an appointment for next Wednesday.

So if you're planning far in advance, my thing keeps moving on, it's very rude. If you're planning in advance, then you can really get ahead on your assignments and we're going to talk about that at some point. I'm going to come back in the semester at some point to talk about time management and that's really important as we get into exams and midterms and those sorts of times because we get very busy and right if you don't schedule in advance you might not be able to see someone. Appointments are scheduled on the hour.

They last for 45 minutes and then the last 15 minutes are for the tutor to fill out a report form and talk about what you did. You can have more than one appointment per day. My thing is auto playing for me and I don't know how to get it to stop. So I apologize for my technical difficulties.

You can have more than one appointment per day, but they can't be back to back. And you should either work on different assignments or make process on the assignment between sessions. It's very likely that we'll have to limit appointments to one per day once midterms and finals get here or earlier, depending on how busy you get. Now, if you miss or cancel appointments, I'm going to. try and see if I can pause this somehow.

No, it's not working. Somehow I've set up autoplay on my slides and I never do that so I don't know how to turn it off. I don't know how this happens.

I can pause and you can take a moment to try to figure it out if you want to. Yeah, so just being nice. I'll pause though.

I have up to two per day but they do get limited during busy times. And so part of that as well is that if you miss or cancel an appointment on the same day three times, you have to meet with me before you can make another appointment. So you temporarily lose appointment privileges.

And the reason we do that, it's not supposed to be a punishment. It's that if there's a lot of people who need appointments and you're missing appointments, then that's taking that time away from someone because no one else can sign up for that time. And usually what I see when someone is signing up for a lot of appointments and canceling them is we need to have a talk about time management and how best to use the center so that you get the help you need and that you're planning your projects appropriately.

So meeting with me, obviously, I'm a very scary person. I'm not scary at all. I've tried to be scary at points in my life and I can't be. It's a great time for us to have a conversation and just make sure that we can make sure that you're using the center in a way that's going to be successful for you.

And also that. other people can make appointments as well. So not a very scary thing. All right. So however, you can cancel an appointment up to 24 hours in advance with no penalty.

So if you had an appointment tomorrow and you realized, you know what, I have too much going on with my life today, I'm not going to be done with my assignment in time to go to that appointment, you can cancel it and that's fine. It's only if you waited until tomorrow to cancel it that it would count. And we have full policies online and I'm going to show you how to find all those policies.

So, big one, how do I sign up? She keeps talking about a scheduling system, but how does it look like? She hasn't shown it to us. This is the scariest bit because more technology, what?

So I'm going to hide my slides now, now that I've figured out how to use them, and I'm going to show you our scheduling system. I'm also going to copy and paste our link into the chat. I strongly recommend, you know, opening this up and saving it as a bookmark.

It's so you never have to lose it. When you open up a Learning Center link, all of the Learning Centers use a system called WC Online. They all have MyWCOnline in the link.

Double check that you're on the right place with this URL. You guys are seeing my screen, right? Yes.

Can you give that to me? Yes. Okay.

I'm always worried things are going to stop working on me. So double check that you are on the right learning center, the right campus. If this looks familiar, that's because we have an orientation video, which I'm currently updating for the in-person.

You guys were the first to see the in-person slides. And once that is finished, that'll get posted here. And- will have all the information that I'm giving you now. So you don't have to remember it because I know it's a lot of information and I would forget it. The reason I have the slides is because it's a lot of information and it helps me remember.

Even when you're on this first page, all the information that you need to successfully make an appointment is here. You don't have to log in yet. We have what kind of tutoring is available, if you forget.

We have links to our policies and information. We have another link to our orientation video, and we have our contact information. So if you ever have trouble using our system or getting an appointment, You can email us, you can call us, and you can also text us on these numbers.

So whenever we have our virtual hours, which is most of the day, someone is monitoring these things and can answer your questions. If you contact us outside of hours, we'll just get back to you the first thing the next day. Now the first time you use our system, you do have to register for an account.

This is separate from your MyMC account. It's entirely different. So You only have to log in here.

You don't have to go through MyMC. To make an account, you click on this bit where it says first visit, register for an account. And it's a fairly standard online form, and I'm hoping that after this last year where most so much of life has gone online, a lot of us are more familiar with it, but I always like to show people. For the email address, you have to use your Montgomery College email address.

If you put in anything different, it won't work. make sure you've spelled Montgomery College correctly and you've put an edu. I often accidentally misspell Montgomery College because I'm typing too quickly, so if there's an error always double check that. We ask your first name, your family name, and your m number. We also ask your first language because we always find that really interesting, and you can include your telephone number, and I strongly recommend it's not required, but I recommend you include your telephone number because that way if you're if you have an online appointment, if you have a live video one, if you're late, the tutor will contact us and be like, hey, it's five minutes into my appointment.

My student hasn't shown up. And what we'll do is we will call you and be like, hey, is everything okay? Are you having trouble with the technology?

And then you go, yes, I can't get in. And then we'll help you get in. And then you don't have to worry about accidentally missing your appointment because technology was being mean.

So I strongly recommend putting in your telephone number. You have to choose a password. I recommend making it different from your MyMC password because these aren't connected.

There's also a section where you can put in your phone number again for text messaging. We have a waitlist system and when things get really busy at the end of the semester or the middle of the semester, you can get on a waiting list and if an appointment opens up, everyone on the waitlist will get a text message. and an email if they put their phone number in here.

If you don't put your phone number in here, you'll only get a text message. So if you want to make sure you can get an appointment during really busy times, put your phone number in here. And then at the bottom, just click complete registration. I'm going to go back and I'm going to log in. I made myself a student account.

So I put in my email address, I put in my password, and I'm going to click the kind of tutoring I want. virtual tutoring, computer reservations, which just books your computer in our computer lab, in-person, and in-person tutoring. I'm going to choose virtual tutoring, and I also recommend clicking stay logged in so it'll remember you for a while.

All right, once you've logged in, there's a lot of friendly information. I know no one ever reads this text box, but it is here. It reminds you what kind of tutoring is available on this schedule.

It reminds you which schedule you're on and what center you're looking at. because if you've accidentally logged into another center, you want to make sure you're going to the right place, especially if you're planning to do something in person. We also always again have a link to our policies and we have a link to our orientation video in case you want to double check any of those and our contact information.

There's contact our contact information on every page so if you're ever having technical difficulties or just have a question, you can contact us. You don't have to sit there all alone and figure out how do I do this. It's a pretty straightforward visual system.

The times when the, I think someone's unmuted. Yeah. Okay.

All right. Thank you. The times when someone's not available is this dark purple color. The times when someone else has booked an appointment is a dark blue. An appointment that's unavailable is gray.

An appointment that's available is white. If you book an appointment, it's a bright, happy yellow. So anything that you see in a bright, happy yellow is your appointment.

All you have to do to book an appointment is click. on the white spot that you want. An appointment form will come up. You have to choose between whether you want live video or written feedback. You put in the course, ELaw 980. You put in the instructor, Professor Kerry Shaw.

You put in the campus, in our case it would be Germantown, and the assignment. This can be descriptive, it can be assignment one, whatever you think. We have a little drop down that asks you what you want to work on today.

you know, if you're brainstorming, if you're planning, if you're writing that outline, you choose plan. If you're working on something you've already written, you'd be revising content. If it's a specific grammar thing, you put grammar, and then we also have other.

We also have this nice box of what would you like the tutor to focus on. This is a place for you to give your tutor more information. Our tutors help with all classes, so they might not be familiar with your specific assignment or what you're being asked to do.

or what your concerns are. So this is a great place to say, you know, to your professor, to the tutor, if you choose something like grammar, saying, you know, I'm working on fixing run-on sentences, or I'm working on my subordinating clauses, or I need help making sure that my sentence order is working. So that's a place where you can give more specific details. The last button is, do you want this report? sent to your professor.

You can say yes or no. It is entirely up to you. But I know Professor Carey loves to see you all come here.

So if you say yes, we will send the report form that the tutor writes up on to her and she will be very excited. The report forms are not a judging thing, by the way. All they say is, you know, this is what the student brought in, this is what you brought in. this is what we worked on together or this is what I reviewed if it was written feedback.

And then we have a section for here's what I recommend, here's what we discussed that be the next steps. So it really is to kind of just be like here's what we did, here's where we're going, very productive sort of thing. The last bit is if you're doing a written feedback session or a in-person tutoring session, you have to choose upload a file. It attaches just like it would to a like an email, so you just choose the file there. I'm going to close this window.

Now, if you realize that you've gotten on to the wrong kind of schedule, there's a drop down up here where you can be like, oh, I actually wanted in-person tutoring, so you can go and choose that, and it looks the same thing. It just says in-person tutoring, and on the appointment form looks all the same, but you don't have to choose what kind of tutoring is because there's only one kind of tutoring for this schedule. It's in-person. If you find that you have technological issues and you need to use a computer while on campus and you want to come use us, there's lots of different places where you can use computer labs, but we do have some computer labs available. We have reservations.

We request that people make the reservations, you know, 20 minutes in advance. If you are having full technological difficulties, you can call us and we can make this appointment for you. This is really just so we know who's coming into the center.

You reserve it for two hours, but you don't have to come at the beginning of those two hours. You can show up anytime during those two hours and it's just there waiting for you. All right, I'm going to pull my slides back up because that's the showing you the scheduling system. Oh, I did want to show you one other thing.

If you forget everything I've told you and you've lost the link to make the scheduling appointment, The easiest way to find us is to go to the main montgomerycollege.edu website and literally put in WRL in the search. If you put in WRL, which stands for writing, reading, and language, our center is the first one because we're alphabetically Germantown the first. So the first result is the Germantown Writing, Reading, and Language Center. You click on that and we have all the information you need. My contact information is right there if you ever want to contact me directly.

And our online scheduling system and our phone numbers are all there. So if you ever lose any of this information, you just go to the main MC website and put in WRL and we're the first search. And it makes my life so much easier when I tell you.

All right, so the last few things, I always like to tell you a few more things about how the WRAL Center can help you, is we also have workshops on essay writing, reading skills, test taking, and research, and I'll show you how to access those in a second. This semester, we also have what we call, what we're calling the writing groups, and I'm going to talk about that in a second too. We also have handouts and links to writing and reading resources, so if you just want a handout, if you just want a little...

additional information, we can send you that. And we can give you technical help with WC Online, with eEnglish and My English Lab, other related WRL Center software. And for that technical help, you just call us or email us.

You don't need to make an appointment for that. It's the sort of thing where all the staff are busy, we'll make an appointment and call you back. Also, when you guys are eventually looking forward to this point in your academic career, we help with scholarship and transfer essays. Already thinking about next steps, we can help you work on those scholarship and transfer essays, particularly since they can sometimes be a very different and challenging kind of writing. I think they're really fun to write, but there also can be, you know, the first time you do it, it can be a new experience.

So we will help with those. Put that in the back of your mind when you're ready to look at scholarships and you're ready to think, start thinking about transfer. Put in the notes. a note, I'm going to go to the Writing, Reading, and Language Center to get some feedback on this.

Again, I always just like to put up a slide with our contact information. We have two different phone numbers that you can always access us remotely. The reason we do that is just if we're talking to someone on one, you won't get a busy signal, so you can just call us on the other. Both of those also forward to our on-campus number, so don't worry if you want to call us on campus directly when you know that we are open on campus. you can do that, but if you call the remote numbers that will get forwarded to on campus if someone is, if we're here.

We also have our shared email address at germantownwrlc at montgomerycollege.edu. So fairly, fairly easy to remember email address, I hope. So the other thing I wanted to show you is our workshops.

So to find our workshops, we actually have a workshop series that we share with the other learning centers. So I'm on the main Montgomery College website and I'm going to put learning centers into this. The fastest way to find anything on this website is to search.

Learning centers is the first option. I'm going to click on that and I'm going to scroll down to where it says workshops and we have a pdf with our workshop series up here. And so, for example, we have, oh, since I was just talking about transfer and scholarship essays, in November, we have a workshop on transfer and scholarship essays.

It's next week? It's next week. Next week, we have workshops on writing essentials and reading essentials. In October, a staff member from the Germantown Writing, Reading, and Language Center is doing one on common grammar and punctuation mistakes, which can be a often is a very popular workshop because it helps us really tackle some of those things that all English language learners, whether you grew up speaking it or you just started learning it, can struggle with. Another thing that we have, and I'm going to, is it on this page or is it on a different page?

It's on a different page. So if I'm going, I'm going to go to our virtual tutoring page. We have, um, Through the WRLC, the three of us, this fall we have what we're calling the writing groups. There's going to be three writing groups that are focused on different topics relating to Black, Latinx, and Asian students, focusing on literature, experience, writing about your own experiences.

I'm really excited for them. I've heard amazing things coming out of these different groups. And so if...

They're open to all students. I think they're only a commitment of maybe one hour once a week or two hours every other couple of weeks. It depends on the group that's happening and if you participate consistently in them.

I'm still finding out the details but I hear there's a small stipend and they'll pay for some of the books that for the books that are required for the writing groups and yes possibly Grubhub gift cards. because who doesn't like food? Don't hold me to that, but I'm pretty sure that's happening, and I'm in a meeting tomorrow about it, and I'm really hoping that's happening.

I'm also going to copy that link into the chat, so if you're interested in those sorts of things, you can join that. It's going to be a really great place to kind of meet people from across the college and be exposed to a lot of people at different languages, different language backgrounds, different levels of skill, and a great place to kind of explore your skills in these topics in a kind of safe situation.

Transcript for:Overview of Writing, Reading, and Language Center

Transcript for:
Overview of Writing, Reading, and Language Center