Author: Janae Haaland

Did you know that you can utilize AI tools as part of your work at George Mason University? It’s important to do so in a safe way, utilizing only services that are authorized for use, and being careful with the types of data that you enter into these tools.

PatriotAI is one such tool that you are authorized to use. It offers a handful of pre-built AI agents and offers the ability to create custom AI agents as well. Make sure that you pay attention to the guidelines for safe use.

Other tools that are approved for use at George Mason include:

Although ChatGPT may be utilized for some very specific use cases, its use is not supported by ITS and not recommended by UL Technology Services. Only public data that is accessible to anyone may be entered into prompts. Never enter data that you have access to only because you are a University employee (such as internal e-mail correspondence, or project and planning documents). It’s also important to turn off the “improve the model for everyone” setting that appears in some versions of ChatGPT.

The world of AI is changing rapidly. We recommend that you check ITS’s AI Toolkit page regularly to check for newly-approved tools.

Post-It Notes are so helpful for writing down all of the little things that you need to remember. Dozens of these notes used to clutter my workspace until I found the Sticky Notes app. To access it within Microsoft Windows PCs, simply type Sticky Notes in the Windows search bar.

NOTE: Mac users can use these instructions from the Apple webpage: Stickies User Guide for Mac – Apple Support

Simply start typing to add content to or images to your note, using the formatting options that are available at the bottom as needed. Click the + symbol at the top to create as many notes as you need.

Click the ellipses (… symbol) in the upper right to explore other options, like changing the color of your notes, viewing a “Notes list” which will show all of your individual sticky notes in the same place, or deleting a note.

After you click the Notes List option, you will also see a gear icon, as shown here:

Click the gear option to sign-in to your Mason Microsoft account (the same as you use for e-mail). One of the advantages of signing in is that you can sync your Sticky Notes across all of your devices.

Want to learn more? Check out Microsoft’s official support page: Get started with Sticky Notes – Microsoft Support. There are also many videos available on YouTube.

We all make typos and mistakes. The good news is that you can easily fix errors in your Microsoft Teams’ chat messages. To do so, hover over the top right corner of your chat message, then select the pencil icon, as shown here:

Make any corrections or additions that you need, then click the checkmark symbol to save your changes, or the X symbol to discard any changes, and keep the original message.

Once a message has been edited, you and others in the Team will be able to see that the chat was edited, as shown here.

The same is true for chat message deletions. To delete a chat message, however over the top right corner of your message again, but this time click on the ellipses symbol, and then select Delete from the menu that appears.

Now for a bit of bad news. It is possible for team owners to prevent team members from editing and deleting chat messages. So if you’re having trouble, that might be the reason why. My experience is that most team owners do allow for edits and deletions.