Aside from sponsoring SPARC, ASSETT (Arts and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology) does a lot of other student-centered projects as well. Here are some of the neat tools that the neat people over at ASSETT have developed just for you! (Begin the shameless self-plugging, but really, these are pretty cool.)
1) Places
This tool is especially helpful for new or transfer students, or if you’re venturing to a corner of campus you’ve never been to before. It allows you to look up a building by its name and see a map of where it’s located, what classrooms it has, and what it looks like. This is great at the beginning of the semester if you don’t know where a building is, or so you can finally put a name to that building you’ve walked past fifty times, but never actually looked at the sign.
2) Syllabus Archive
Lost your syllabus? Look it up with this nifty syllabus archive. This is also useful for finding out what a course you may want to take will look like. You can get an idea about what books are required, what kinds of assignments there are, or what the reading load will be, before you even sit down in the class. The archive is somewhat limited right now, but new courses are being added often, so check it out.
3) Optical Character Recognition Service
I think this one is the coolest tool on the list. How many times have you opened a PDF for class and found to your utter dismay that it was images instead of text, meaning you couldn’t highlight it, search it or select it? Luckily, there’s a fix for that now! The OCR service allows you to upload PDFs and it will convert them into searchable documents, or right them if they’ve got any funny business. After that, you can re-download them and highlight or search to your heart’s content. No more squinting at a crooked PDF or trying to type-out a quote. Life is easy again! Note: OCR is ore compatible with Safari and Firefox than Chrome, so all you Google worshippers should hop over to a different browser to get the best use out of this tool.
