Welcome to Rhode Island College! Here’s what you need to know about the technology on campus. The three big technology portals you need to be familiar with are RIConnect, Blackboard and Live@ RIC. RIConnect is the college’s online management portal – through this interface you can register for courses, view class schedules and grades, review financial aid packages and outstanding bills, update your contact information, enroll in RIC’s emergency notification text messages, review transferred credits and plan out your academic career semester-by-semester. In addition, if you are a student worker in a department on campus, you can pull up digital print-outs of all of your pay- checks. In several years, you will also be able to use RIConnect to apply for graduation! You can access RIConnect from the link on RIC.edu, or by pointing your web browser to riconnect.ric. edu.
While you use RIConnect to get your schedules and handle important student information, Blackboard is the College’s learning management system. In short, it’s an optional online component to each course you take at RIC. Using Blackboard is up to each professor, so some courses you take may use it, and others may not. Blackboard augments courses with online discussion boards and forums, a space to upload documents like syllabi, class notes and projects, view grades per assignment and other features each professor may choose to use. Some courses that you take may be “hybrid” or “online only” courses which fully utilize Blackboard for class assignments and lectures. You can find Blackboard by clicking the online services link on RIC.edu or by visiting blackboard.ric.edu.
Rounding out the big three is our email and document collaboration solution, Live@RIC. Rhode Island College has partnered with Microsoft to give every RIC student a Microsoft Outlook email account. This email will be yours for life, transitioning to an alumni account after you graduate. Our email addresses are set up such that your student username for example: jsmith_1234 is followed by the suffix @email.ric.edu. Each email address functions as a Windows Live ID and Microsoft account. Your email has 10 GB of space for storing a huge amount of messages and can easily be connected to your iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Windows Phone, and can be connected to Microsoft Out- look for Windows and Mac OS X. Note that Rhode Island College uses your Live@RIC email address as the official way of communicating important information to you, as well as correspondence with your professors. You can access your student email through the webmail link on RIC.edu.
One of the most important components of Live@RIC – and the killer feature that will make your imminent life of paper-writing and project-authoring so much easier is the SkyDrive. SkyDrive is a hard drive on the Internet that is password-protect- ed and accessed via your email. Every RIC student has one. It holds seven GB of data, and you can put anything you want on your SkyDrive. Saving all of your documents to SkyDrive ensures that you won’t lose your work due to a computer crash, and your work is accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. Even if you are on a computer with no versions of Microsoft Office installed, you can use Web App versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote to create, edit and review your documents in your web browser.
SkyDrive is accessed through a number of ways. From your email inbox, click the links to either Office or more at the top of the header. You can also install SkyDrive apps for your Windows Vista or 7 PCs, or your Mac if you run OS X 10.7 Lion. SkyDrive mobile apps are available for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Windows Phone and Android devices. You can also access your SkyDrive by pointing your web browser to skydrive.com and logging in with your RIC email and password.
That’s about it, students! If you have any issues with any of the above- listed services, call the Student Help Desk located in the Horace Mann Tech Center at (401) 456-8886.
