Category: Academic Technology

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Moodle, Workshops and Training

Moodle Workshops and Drop In Consulting Times

Andrew Ruether

Moodle is replacing Blackboard as Swarthmore’s learning management system.  While Blackboard will be available until June 2012, ITS is encouraging faculty to switch their courses to Moodle before the last minute. ITS will be hosting Moodle training and consulting on August 23-25 (Tuesday – Thursday) in the ITS Media Center (Beardsley 114). From 1:30PM – 2:30PM each day, we will have an Introduction to Moodle workshop. From 2:30PM – 4PM each day we will have consulting time where faculty and staff can drop by to work on their courses or ask questions about Moodle. If you have any questions, don’t … Continue reading Moodle Workshops and Drop In Consulting Times

Academic Technology, Classroom and Conferencing Technologies

New HD Classrooms

Michael Bednarz

Over the past two summers, Media Services has upgraded a number of classrooms, seminar rooms, and lecture halls to high definition projection A/V systems. What this means is that you will now be able to show your laptop presentations in high definition and wide screen. The installed classroom computers and disc players will project in high definition. Not all of the classrooms have this capability.  We have compiled a list of rooms that we call HD Digital Media A/V projection systems. For more information on our HD classrooms, please visit the Media Services website. Below is a list of rooms … Continue reading New HD Classrooms

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Software, Students, Workshops and Training

R Statistical Software Training

Andrew Ruether

R is a free statistics program widely used at Swarthmore (and the rest of the world, too).  If you would like to learn more about how to use R, ITS will be hosting a series of web training sessions from the National Institute from Computational Sciences.  The sessions take place every Wednesday at 3PM from June 22 to July 6, 2011.  The topics are: June 22 – Introduction to R June 29 – R graphing with ggplot2 July 6 – Parallel computing with R Contact Andrew Ruether (aruethe2, x8254) if you would like to attend any of the sessions. Continue reading R Statistical Software Training

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Software

New Versions of Microsoft Office Now Available!

Mark Davis

MS Office 2010 (Windows) and MS Office 2011 (Mac) are available for download. Office 2010 (Windows): While the look of Office 2010 hasn’t changed much from 2007, its feel and navigation has certainly improved. For more information on what’s new in Office 2010 visit: http://www.microsoft.com/office/make-it-great/en-us/whatsnew.aspx Office 2011 (Mac): Outlook users rejoice!! Outlook is now available in 2011. For more information on what’s new in Office 2011 visit: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/word/whats-new   Continue reading New Versions of Microsoft Office Now Available!

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Software, Students

Summer Software Developers: Don’t forget version control

Andrew Ruether

If you are planning on doing software development this summer, consider using some form of version control software.  This will let you backup your work, allow you to roll back to a previous version, and make it easy for multiple users to work on the same code.  If you are still appending suffixes on to different versions of your program (e.g. myapp, myapp_1, myapp_2, myapp_old, etc.) version control will be a big help. There are a number of free or paid options available online, but ITS offers a free software development system including version control.  If you are interested, get … Continue reading Summer Software Developers: Don’t forget version control

Academic Technology, Computer Classrooms, Faculty/Staff, Media Center, Public Computing, Students

Print Release Station Saves Trees, CO2, Real $$

Doug Willen

The Print Release Stations, which we’ve tested a bit in McCabe, and have been testing in the Beardsley Media Center continuously since Spring Break, have led to real savings in resources not used…  that is, jobs that people send to the printer, but choose not to actually print (or just forget to pick up). In the past one month (April 5, 2011 to May 5, 2011) we have saved a total of 8,159 pages, of which, 5,847 were color pages and 2,312 were grayscale.  They would have been printed on 5,807 sheets of paper (some people choose duplex).  To put … Continue reading Print Release Station Saves Trees, CO2, Real $$