What's new?
We always have projects going on and new services or features become available
to you all the time. Here are a few examples of what has been recently finished:
- Windows 7 -
The campus started the move this past summer to Windows 7. Many of the new
and existing computers have been setup running Windows 7. Beyond being
the latest and greatest version of Windows, Windows 7 offers better speed
and many productivity enhancements. For example, you can "pin" your most
common applications to your taskbar so you don't have to hunt for them.
Learn more at Microsoft.
- Snow Leopard - The new Macs this past summer have been
rolled out with Snow Leopard or MacOS 10.6. This update is not greatly different
than MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) but offers several speed and reliability enhancements.
Learn more at Apple.
- MS Office 2010 / 2011 - MS Office has again updated
to a new version. Office 2010 for PCs is not terribly different from 2007.
Learn more at Microsoft.
Office 2011 for Macs is more like the PC version and a change from Office
2008. It is quicker and has some nice new options. Learn more at Microsoft.
- GroupWise Mobility - To better provide options for iPhones
and Droid phones, we are now running a GroupWise mobility server. This server
allows iPhones and Droids to synchronize calendars, email and contacts with
GroupWise. Talk to your LFC if you have
a smart phone and want to go mobile.
- Call
pilot on the web - A little-used feature of the Augsburg voicemail
system is a web interface to voicemail boxes. https://callpilot.augsburg.edu Can
download and listen to voicemail messages as WAVE files. This can be
handy if you're on the road and want to hear your voicemail without dialing
numbers.
- Campus bandwidth increase to 150MB - Campus
bandwidth was upgraded from 120
MB to 150 MB.
- Web time entry - Starting in January everyone began using
the web time entry system for recording vacation time. The days of the blue
sheets are over. The system has been around for a year and was mainly used
by student workers and employees that were paid biweekly before the College
moved to biweekly payroll for everyone. While this is really a human resources
project, we did help.
- VoiceThread - Augsburg just licensed VoiceThread for
everyone to use. With VoiceThread you can create online collaborative multimedia
slide shows where you can invite others to comment with voice, video, or
text. There are a lot of examples and tutorials at the VoiceThread
support site or our Augsburg
knowledgebase. Faculty can create a VoiceThread assignment
in moodle so students can submit VoiceThreads in moodle. Look for VoiceThread
in your moodle courses under "Augsburg Tools" on the right-hand
side or
login now at http://augsburg.voicethread.com/.
What's brewing?
We always have projects under development that may or may not make it. Sometimes
things we try don't turn out so we decide to move on to another idea. Here
are a few examples of things we're trying out:
- Quality Matters - The college has recently subscribed
to Quality
Matters which is a research-based rubric for assessing quality in online
course design. Many institutions are using Quality Matters or have based
their internal quality checks on Quality Matters. The rubric is updated
every two years as the research body continually grows. The rubric is a
useful guide for making sure important elements as present in a course and
the focus is on the process and not the product.
|