Study skills hub

Assignment Planning

Wednesday 21 October 2026 10.30am - Friday 11 December 2026 12pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

Assignment planning at university involves organising and scheduling the tasks required to complete academic assignments. This workshop covers understanding the assignment requirements, breaking down tasks, setting deadlines, and allocating time effectively to ensure thorough research, writing, and revision.

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Top Tips for Accessible Social Media Content

Monday 9 November 2026 1pm - 2pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

What good is trying to reach people with social media content if it's inaccessible for some people? In this bitesize session we will look at:

• A range of transferable principles and tips for making accessible social media content
• Tips on using some social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube
• A checklist of considerations while writing and creating content

There will be chance to ask questions and share your own useful methods and tips.

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Getting Started with RStudio

Monday 9 November 2026 2pm - 4pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

This workshop will introduce you to the RStudio interface, and writing R code to import, manage and plot data. Suitable for people who have not done any computer coding before, but would like to use RStudio in the future to carry out statistical analyses.

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Organise your life with Google!

Tuesday 10 November 2026 10am - 11.30am

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

Sort your life out!

Join us for this session as we share tips on how to use Google’s tools to help you stay organised. Whether it’s using note taking apps to stay on top of your to-do list, managing your time effectively in Google Calendar, staying on top of your emails or organising your files in Google Drive, we’ve got you covered.

We will look at helping you get organised with:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Keep
• Google Tasks
• Google Drive
• Google Chrome
• Google Contacts.

Google Workspace: a Practical Guide

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Designing presentations in PowerPoint and Google Slides

Tuesday 10 November 2026 1pm - 3pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

How can you create presentation slides that are memorable and impactful while also being accessible? PowerPoint and Google Slides include many under-exploited features that can help you create more effective presentations (as well as other resources). This session explores the principles of designing presentations, including templates, animation, accessibility principles, and working with media. We'll also look at presentation features in these tools that can help you as you convey your material to an audience.

Presentations Practical Guide

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Writing and Citing

Wednesday 11 November 2026 10.30am - 12pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

In academic writing, we need to refer to the ideas and work of others. To do this, we often use direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. This workshop will focus on when and how to use sources in these different ways. It will also focus on how to avoid plagiarism when using others' work. Find related online resources here: https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/academic-writing

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The Distractibles Meetup

Wednesday 11 November 2026 12.30pm - 1.30pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: LFA/144 Academic Skills workshop room (Harry Fairhurst Building, Campus West)
Open to: Students/staff

Finding it hard to focus and plagued by distractions? Join The Distractibles Meetup on Wednesdays, 12.30pm to 1.30pm in the Library, LFA/144. We are a support group of staff and students with small group chat and accessibility ideas to try. Whether you're neurodivergent or just easily distracted, our peer-support group might be just the thing for you. The Distractibles

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Confidence to Speak and Listen (COSAL)

Wednesday 11 November 2026 1.30pm - 3.15pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: LFA/144 Academic Skills workshop room (Harry Fairhurst Building, Campus West)
Open to: Everyone

Confidence to Speak and Listen workshops are open to all. They give you the chance to get to know others from different disciplines and to practise communicating. Each time we meet we engage in interactive activities involving your voice, your body and your ears! We discuss confidence from perspectives of both speaker and listener and identify communication strategies to take away and apply in different contexts. To get maximum benefit and build your confidence incrementally, we recommend coming to more than one workshop. These interactive sessions are not recorded. The content is different each time, as it is built by you on the day. Slides are not available.

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Get started with Audio Editing

Wednesday 11 November 2026 2pm - 3pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Open to: Everyone

Needing to edit a podcast or audio track? In this hybrid session, we'll share our top tips for when it comes to editing an audio file. We'll take you through some tools and advice on how to edit any sound file; whether you're making a podcast, playing around with music or just recording yourself. From trimming and splitting your clips to our favourite tools, this session will get you ready for creating and combining your own audio files. This session is useful if you have any audio like music, podcast or recordings. We'll show you the fundamentals to start having a go yourself.

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Essential Spreadsheets (a 5 week course)

Thursday 12 November 2026 10am - 12pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

In these sessions you will learn how to exploit the capabilities of both Excel and Google Sheets for storing and analysing data, including features that are particularly helpful when working collaboratively.

All five sessions take place over five weeks, on Thursday mornings.

This course will take place online via Zoom.

Essential Spreadsheets: a Practical Guide

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Creating Interactive Graphs in RStudio

Thursday 12 November 2026 2pm - 3pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

This session will cover how to make interactive graphs in RStudio. You will learn how to go beyond simple bar or scatter graphs, and make them more interesting, such as animating a graph, building 3D graphs, and creating a moving gif of your graph. Suitable for people who have used RStudio previously and would like to create interactive graphs from their data in the future.

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Essential Video Editing

Thursday 12 November 2026 3pm - 5pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: LFA/103 Creativity Lab (Harry Fairhurst Building, Campus West)
Open to: Everyone

Want to be able to edit video content?

Video is a really useful medium for storytelling, educating, and sharing your ideas. Whether you're making a longer film, or short videos for social media, we'll cover tips on many types of video. Based in the Creativity lab, this session will go through key video editing concepts and techniques to help you get started, from gathering your material to exporting your completed video. We’ll explore top tips for recording video and sound, along with how to put everything together using video editing software. During the session, you'll have a go at editing pre-recorded footage using some recommended tools and you will be able to begin your own creation.

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Essay Writing

Friday 13 November 2026 10.30am - 12pm

Organiser: Academic Skills
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

How to understand correctly what essay titles are asking you to do, and how this can help you to adopt an appropriate essay structure and line of argument are the main focuses of this session. It will also introduce a range of essay structures and strategies for developing persuasive arguments. Find related online resources here: https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/academic-writing

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Generative AI for students: Google Gemini

Friday 13 November 2026 1pm - 2pm

Organiser: Digital Skills & Creativity Lab
Location: online
Open to: Everyone

Generative AI tools can be used effectively to work through problems or to develop your understanding of a topic, but you need to think carefully about the ‘prompts’ (the questions and commands) you're using if you're to get good quality results. In this hour-long bitesize workshop we will explore how to craft effective and safe prompts for the main AI tools we have at York — Google Gemini and NotebookLM — and how this compares to more traditional ways of finding academic information. We will also consider how to adapt and interpret your outputs, and how to make best use of advanced models and features within the tools.

This session will be particularly useful for taught students but is open to anyone at the University.

Generative AI: a Practical Guide

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