Uploading Assessments
For details of the standards required for an assessment see the “NCA Presentation of Assignments Guide” which gives you detailed guidance on how to present your written assignments. The Guide can be found on the VLE, on the Documents tab – College Documents – College Handbook and Related Documents., and on the SharePoint Student Hub/College Handbook.
Including images in your assignment can greatly add to the quality of your work – but they can also greatly add to the size of the file. Grossly oversized documents create many issues including being too large to upload at all. They can create problems for storage, bandwidth and vastly increase the amount of storage required for primary and backup use. A good free utility you can use to manage your images on a PC is Pixresizer. This can be downloaded from www.pixresizer.en.softonic.com
https://en.softonic.com/s/image-size-reducer:mac/free has some free image size manager tools suitable for a Mac, or you may find one for your specific type of hardware from the same site.
Once you have completed your assignment, we ask that you save it as a portable data file (.pdf), which can be easily read and transported across a variety of computer platforms. Microsoft Office programs (Word, Excel etc.) include options to save your work as a PDF built into them. Alternatively, a good free utility with which to create PDFs is cutepdf. This can be downloaded from www.cutepdf.com and is available in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 versions.
The Mac is a PDF maker — that functionality is built into Mac OS X. From the Print dialog/sheet in any application, you should see a PDF button which, when clicked, gives you a little menu of options related to PDFs, one of which is simply to save whatever you were going to print as a PDF. Some applications, like Preview or Pages, also have their own options to export a document or picture you're working on as a PDF. If necessary, there are also tools available for the Mac such as pdf creator available from pdf-creator-mac.en.softonic.com.
