Accessibility Advocate Shoutout #3- Melissa Wong!

At the iSchool Help Desk, we are excited that we get to help the school as it prepares to meet updated federal standards about digital accessibility. Making education accessible and equitable is a huge task, and no one person can take it on alone. We want to recognize those who have been stepping up to become Accessibility Advocates at the iSchool.

Whether they have been educating others about accessibility for years, or they’ve recently made the commitment to jump in and try their best, we think it’s important to recognize the efforts being made and the amazing impact that we can make as an iSchool community if we all do our part!

We will be spotlighting some of these advocates monthly during the school year. This is a great chance to recognize and uplift these efforts, to encourage one another as a community to keep striving, and to help students get to know our instructors a little better!

Now, meet our featured Accessibility Advocate for May: Melissa Wong!

Headshot of Melissa Wong, iSchool Adjunct Lecturer. She has shoulder-length brown hair, glasses, a black shirt, and a beaded necklace and earrings.

iSchool Adjunct Lecturer
MS, Library and Information Science, Illinois
Currently Teaching: Spring 2025 – Instructional Strategies and Techniques for Information Professionals (IS471OAG, IS471OBG), Academic Librarianship (IS582ALO), E-Learning (IS591ELO); Summer 2025 – Instructional Strategies and Techniques for Information Professionals (IS471OAG).

When we started this project, one name came up over and over again: Melissa Wong. We are excited to recognize Melissa as an Accessibility Advocate because of how educated and well-versed she is, but also because of how her work encourages others at the iSchool to continue learning and growing in our skills. From leading workshops on topics of digital accessibility that are attended by hundreds of professionals, to ensuring that her students learn about digital accessibility practices for their future careers, Melissa is putting in so much work and the iSchool is better for it.

Get to know more about what Melissa has to say about accessibility and teaching below!

Q: Why is it important to you to work towards more accessible classes?

A: Most importantly, I want to create an inclusive learning experience for all students and accessibility is one strategy for creating that inclusive environment. In addition, we know that accessibility is just good design – accessibility practices benefit all learners. Another reason I emphasize accessibility in my courses is to model what accessible design looks like, since students will be expected to practice accessibility in their careers.

Q: What is a favorite thing that you’ve learned from an impactful professor?

A: In undergrad, I had a professor who was a fantastic lecturer. Lecture can get a bad rap for not being student-centered, and her example reminds me that a well-crafted lecture can be engaging and thought-provoking. Her example also reminds me, as I like to tell students in my instructional design courses, that there are a lot of ways to be a good teacher. Good pedagogy is not a one-size-fits-all situation.

Q: What is your teaching style?

A: My teaching style is very student-centered. My courses emphasize active learning, engaging with other students through discussion and assignments, and reflective practice. I also tend to be very organized, which I know students appreciate!

Q: What class(es) do you really love teaching?

A: I love all the courses I teach for different reasons. I teach two courses on instructional design (IS471 and IS591EL) and since I’m passionate about good teaching, I really enjoy those courses. They always feel very meta – we are learning about learning and teaching as we are learning and teaching. Most students end up reflecting a lot on themselves as learners while also building their knowledge and confidence as teachers. My eLearning course (591EL) has a significant accessibility component, so that is fun as well. I also love teaching reference (IS501) since that is what drew me to librarianship in the first place. The goal of reference is to connect people with information, which is really the point of everything we do as librarians – for me, reference is librarianship distilled down to its essence.

Q: Do you have any advice for others who are working to learn more about course accessibility?

A: Accessibility is complex, whether we are thinking about technology accessibility or accessible instructional design. It can be overwhelming to get started, especially once you realize how much there is to know. It is important to start somewhere, whether that is learning to create an accessible document or use the accessibility features in Canvas, and then just keep learning more. Since technology changes quickly, there’s always more to learn, even for experienced accessibility professionals. Lucky for us, the University of Illinois is a leader in this area and we have great resources available to us as well as expert colleagues we can consult.

Thank you so much to Melissa Wong for your dedication to accessible and inclusive teaching! And thank you to everyone who is working towards a better and more inclusive iSchool. Let’s all keep this going!

This will be the last Shoutout posted for this school year. Please keep sharing these and reach out with nominations, as we will be continuing these shoutouts starting in August.

If you know someone who has been exemplifying this effort in some way, please reach out to us at ischool-support@illinois.edu to nominate them and tell us a little bit about what you want to celebrate!

– iSchool Help Desk

Help Desk Newsletter- April

Welcome to our iSchool Help Desk monthly newsletter!! We use this to share updates about what we’ve been up to. Whether you’re a current student, faculty, or staff; or maybe even an alumni or friend of the iSchool Help Desk and want to keep in-the-know about us, we’re glad to have you! You can expect updates about the major initiatives and projects we are working on, pictures and updates from our fun social events, and anything else up and coming at the iSchool Help Desk!

Accessibility Advocate Shoutouts

We have been helping support the iSchool as they work towards more accessible class materials to meet changing federal standards. We would like to celebrate those who have been stepping up to become Accessibility Advocates at the iSchool – whether they have been educating others about accessibility for years, or they’ve recently made the commitment to jump in and try their best, we think it’s important to recognize the effort and amazing impact that we can make as an iSchool community if we all do our part!

In March, we began spotlighting some of these advocates on a monthly basis. This is a great chance to recognize and uplift these efforts, to encourage one another as a community to keep striving, and to help students get to know our instructors a little better! Please check out our shoutout from April, lecturer Craig Evans, and keep an eye out for our last Advocate of this semester to be shared later in the week! Feel free to email us at ischool-support@illinois.edu to nominate any instructors and let us know their impact!

Check out the blog post here!

Help Desk Social Event- Game Night

We had another successful Help Desk social event, a game night! We enjoyed snacks and some fun board and video games as a group, including Quiplash, as you can see below.

Exciting Life Updates!

We have several exciting life updates as our GAs continue to search for jobs, prepare to graduate or to train our incoming GAs in August, and more!

Help Desk GA Audrey has accepted a position as the Librarian for Creative and Instructional Technologies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee!! She is very excited to be starting this position in July! We will be lost without her, but we’re so excited to see her take her amazing skills and positive personality and use them to succeed.

Help Desk GA Victoria has accepted a position as Research and Learning Librarian & Assistant Professor at Stetson University in Florida!! She will be starting in June. We are going to miss her warm presence so much, but we know that no one is more qualified than her and she will do an amazing job wherever she is!

First-year GA Elliot is also very excited to share that they have recently gotten engaged and will be married in October!

We hope you will keep on cheering on our GAs who are about to graduate and looking to find their next steps! We know they’ll all do great, and we all appreciate how supportive our community is.

April Fools Day

As per tradition, the Help Desk partook in many April Fools Day shenanigans. For the day, we became the Psychic Help Desk – offering cootie catchers to tell your fortune, tarot readings by absolute amateurs, and lots of fun graphics on our signs. Check out just a few of them below! Thanks to everyone who entertained our silly endeavors.

Hygiene items in bathrooms

While this is not directly Help Desk related (although we like to think we had a hand in pushing for this to get done), after months of waiting, the bathrooms in our building on the 4th floor now have hygiene supplies in them! We are excited for this building to be just a little bit more inclusive and accessible. Thank you to our awesome Facilities team!

Help Desk Menu

Lately, we have had several creative presentations given at our Team Meetings. If you’ve ever wondered what sort of coffee shop drink one of us Help Desk-ers most embodies, or if you’re curious to get to know us a little better, this presentation about the “Help Desk Menu” by Elliot might be of interest to you. Maybe you will even be motivated to try out one of the Help Desk-er inspired drinks!

Upcoming…

Thank you so much for reading our newsletter, and for all of your support! We are excited to be able to keep everyone updated on the fun things happening at the Help Desk and in our community. Keep an eye out for next month’s newsletter!

Help Desk Newsletter- March

Welcome to our NEW iSchool Help Desk monthly newsletter!! We will be using this to share updates about what we’ve been up to. Whether you’re a current student, faculty, or staff; or an alumni or friend of the iSchool Help Desk and want to keep in-the-know about us, we’re glad to have you! You can expect updates about the major initiatives and projects we are working on, pictures and updates from our fun social events, and anything else up and coming at the iSchool Help Desk!

Digital Accessibility

One of our biggest undertakings this semester has been to provide resources and support for the iSchool as it begins working to meet upcoming new federal accessibility standards. You can learn more about how the U of I is preparing for digital accessibility compliance here. Updating all course materials to meet these standards by April of next year is a big task, and we’re working in many different ways to provide support.

Our GAs have created workshops for faculty and Teaching Assistants about topics such as PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, and Canvas accessibility practices and tools. We are currently working on adapting these and recording them as videos so that these trainings can be taken on instructors own schedules. We are also working to create short videos about specific common accessibility issues and how to remedy them, as well as important tools that can be used while updating materials to be more accessible!

Keep an eye out for these materials, and feel free to reach out to us with any questions. We’re always happy to help!

March Madness- Battle of the Books!

For our own version of March Madness, we had a bracket-style battle of the book genres! Starting with 16 genres (fiction and non-fiction), we had the iSchool vote for their favorite literary genres at the Help Desk each week to narrow them down.

Book Genre Bracket at the Help Desk. There is a container with drawers that are labelled with different genres to place votes in, and a paper underneath showing the different genres that are facing off with each other.

And we finally have a winner! Drumroll……

Comics!!! Enjoy a picture of our display celebrating the iSchool’s chosen favorite genre! Thank you so much to everyone who passionately participated every week, had good-natured debates, and shared your voices with us!

Collage of comic-style illustrations. In a speech bubble it reads “Winner of the March Madness book genre bracket: comics! I came down to between history and comics, with one vote determining comics as the winner. Your vote matters! Thank you for playing!”. In another text bubble beneath, it reads “What are your favorite comics?”.

Accessibility Advocate Shoutouts

As mentioned above, we have been helping support the iSchool as they work towards more accessible class materials. We would like to celebrate those who have been stepping up to become Accessibility Advocates at the iSchool – whether they have been educating others about accessibility for years, or they’ve recently made the commitment to jump in and try their best, we think it’s important to recognize the effort and amazing impact that we can make as an iSchool community if we all do our part!

In March, we began spotlighting some of these advocates on a monthly basis. This is a great chance to recognize and uplift these efforts, to encourage one another as a community to keep striving, and to help students get to know our instructors a little better! Please check out our first shoutout from March, professor Steve Oberg, and keep an eye out for our next Advocate to be shared later in the week! Feel free to email us at ischool-support@illinois.edu to nominate any instructors and let us know their impact!

Check out the blog post here!

Black background with a spotlight, and a headshot of Steve Oberg in the center. It says “Steve Oberg” at the top and “March ’25” at the bottom.

Community Shelf Updates

As we shared last month, our GA Delia has created a wonderful community shelf with free items to share. It now has a lovely new Grateful Space shelf, where anyone can come and share something they are grateful for, a cute drawing, or anything else uplifting! Please feel free to come add to this positive community creation.

A shelf with a sign that reads “Grateful Space. This is a space to share things that make you happy on sticky notes, leave a doodle, and express your joy.” There are coloring pages, sticky note pads, and crayons on the shelf. Surrounding the sign are various sticky notes reading things like “I am grateful for movies”, “I am grateful for pasta”, “I’m grateful for my friends”, etc.

Help Desk Social Events

For this month’s social events for the Help Desk GAs, we went to two wonderful escape rooms at Champaign Urbana Adventures in Time and Space! In two teams we tackled the Forest of Fables and Rise of the Icarus escape rooms. Both teams made it out successfully (one team with only 30 seconds to spare!) and had a wonderful time!

Several Help Desk GAs & friends posing in front of a large storybook with various props from the escape room.

Several Help Desk GAs and friends posing with the spaceship set of their escape room (one of them is holding a rocket).

Ramadan Fast-Breaking

Here at the Help Desk, we are well-known for our free candy. At the suggestion of one of our GAs, the Help Desk has also decided to provide dates and water bottles in the evenings during the holy month of Ramadan for any iSchool friends who happened to be fasting. This is a traditional way of breaking one’s fast after the sun goes down during Ramadan. We always strive to be a welcoming space for all of our iSchool family, and we hope this was just one of many ways we are able to show that!

A water bottle, a bag of dates, and a sign that reads “Observing Ramadan? Please help yourself to complementary dates and water!” on the front of the Help Desk.

Job Search Updates

As they prepare to graduate very soon, our second-year GAs are all searching for jobs and trying to find out where they’ll end up next.

Audrey has had a couple of interviews and had another big interview this week. Wanheng has an all-day interview on May 2nd. Another GA has several interviews coming up, and shared this:

“The search process really takes long and the feeling of not being selected makes it longer and stressful. But I think the experience makes it worth it. I just will keep trying and trust God!”

We know they’ll all do an amazing job! Please join me in wishing them the best of luck! ❤️

New Graduate Assistants

Our Help Desk managers have interviewed and found 5 amazing new incoming students to hire as Graduate Assistants starting this Fall, to replace the fantastic GAs that we will be losing after graduation. We are so excited to welcome some new faces – stay tuned to find out more about them later and welcome them to the team.

Stormy Weather

So far, all of us at the Help Desk have been staying safe from the bad weather. We hope you are all staying safe and sound as well!

Welcome back, Ky!

Our beloved newest manager (Senior IT Specialist), Ky, has returned from parental leave and we are all so excited to have them back! They are glad to be back, and the new baby is doing well. Please enjoy a recent picture of their absolutely precious little ones.

Ky’s two-year-old child and 3-month old baby sitting on a couch together, looking precious.

Upcoming…

Most of the current Help Desk GAs posing behind the Help Desk with paper hearts, one party hat, and smiles. Left to right: Victoria, Mohammed, Daniel (his face is covered), Maggie, Kyleigh, Delia, Audrey, Britany, Elliot, and Gates.

Tech Tip: Graduation Resources

Image congratulating new UIUC graduates and sharing a link to resources they can access after graduating.

As finals wrap up and the fall semester comes to an end, some of you are getting ready to graduate. With graduation comes a bunch of important questions, including ones like: will I lose access to my university account? If so, when? How do I save files linked to my Outlook email? My Box account? My Canvas courses?

Never fear! The Help Desk has a Knowledge Base article all about how long you keep your access to university accounts, as well as information about how to save important files and emails. If you still have more questions about graduation and what login information and tech services you can access, please reach out to us! The Help Desk is happy to help answer your questions and concerns. You can contact us at 217-244-4903 or ischool-support@illinois.edu. You can also visit us in-person at 614 E Daniel Street. We’re located on the 4th floor, and will be open for the summer from 9am-5pm Monday through Friday.

Tech Tip: Zoom Timer

Zoom just updated, and the new update included a new feature: Zoom Timer! You can now set up a timer or stopwatch and use it during a Zoom meeting. Learn more about how to turn on and use the new timer feature in the linked Knowledge Base article.

Tech Tip: Printer Help

Bad news iSchoolers: our printers are, once again, on the fritz. Printing from your personal devices will be unreliable for the next few weeks. The Help Desk is here to provide some key tips to help printing go as smoothly as possible.

Over the next few weeks, we recommend either printing using Papercut or by using the computer kiosks near several printers around the iSchool.

Papercut is the printing portal used across the university. You can log into Papercut using your netID and password, then select a document to print through Papercut. It is important to note that Papercut automatically prints documents in black and white and double-sided, and you cannot change these settings in Papercut. If you need to print a document in another format, we recommend using one of the printer kiosks in the iSchool.

There are several computer kiosks available around the iSchool:

In the basement of 501 E. Daniels St., next to the printer Chip.
On the second floor of 501 E. Daniels St., next to the printer Optimus.
On the fourth floor of 614 E. Daniels St., next to the printer Luna and right across from the Help Desk.

You can also access a list of all iSchool printers and their locations in our KnowledgeBase.

To access the printer kiosks, log in with your netID and password. You should upload the document you want to print to your email or to a hard drive so it is easily accessible. Once you are logged in, you should be able to access the document and print it using whatever software you prefer. Using the kiosk does allow you to print in color and single-sided.

If you are still experiencing issues printing, never fear! The Help Desk is here to handle your printing issues. You can contact us at:

Email: ischool-support@illinois.edu
Phone: 217-244-4903 or 800-377-1892
or message us via our Tech Chat service.

Tech Tip: Course Registration

Course registration has started! As you register, you may experience issues using the system or get frustrated by navigation issues. The Help Desk is here to help you resolve these issues and set you up for success in the coming semesters.

Here are several quick tips if you experience issues registering for courses:

Clear your cache and cookies. Sometimes that’s all you need to do to fix the registration system!
Check for holds on your account – you may need to resolve them before you can register.
Double-check your registration time.
If you experience an error registering for a course, double-check the course requirements. It might be the wrong section of a course, or you may need to meet certain pre-requisites before you can register.
Make sure you hit the “Submit” button to register for selected courses – otherwise, your registration will not be saved!

The registrar also has resources to help guide you through the registration process. It’s a great resource for a variety of questions about the registration process, changing the amount of credits you register for, and more!

Tech Tip: Webtools

Have you ever needed to share a link to an important website or document, but the link was way too long? Or have you needed to create a QR Code, but the sites you tried online tried to get you to pay to make one? Fortunately, UIUC has access to Webtools. Webtools has a number of different features, including “Short URLs” to create better named URLs and QR codes for websites. The Help Desk has a Knowledge Base article explaining how Webtool’s “Short URLs” feature works. It’s a great tool for sharing presentations and websites in a variety of different ways.

Tech Tip: Electronics Recycling Event

Electronics Recycling Event, Saturday, May 18th, 2024. Registration opens on April 1. Open to all those living in participating Champaign County communities. Visit ecycle.simplybook.me to learn more! Image of electronics against a blue background.

Do you have old electronics you need to get rid of? Good news! Champaign County is holding an electronics recycling event on May 18th, 2024. Registration for the event opens in just a few days on Monday, April 1st. They will accept a wide variety of electronics, including televisions, computers and laptops, phones and phone accessories, and more. More information about the event, its location, and what items they will accept is available on the booking page for the e-recycling event.

Tech Tip: Syllabus Project

Class registration is coming up! Are you still deciding what iSchool classes to take next semester? It can be difficult to choose, especially when there are so many classes that sound interesting. To aid in your registration decision-making, the iSchool has compiled a Box folder of syllabi from previous semesters which can be accessed by all iSchool students.