Our New Support Site is only one part of the upgrade to the latest version of Desire2Learn.
The upgrade, now complete, took place over this past weekend.
Faculty should be able to log into the server and see their current courses. There is still some tweaking going on behind the scenes but all in all, it is ready to go.
Since we are hosting the Earth Fest this year, it seems fitting to also take a look at some actions you can take here at work and home to help with our environmental footprint.
Check your monitor energy settings: If you use a PC, take a quick trip to the Display Properties. Click on the Screen Saver tab and then click o the Power button in the lower right. From there, you can make some adjustments about how your monitor, hard drive and the entire system will power down to save energy when you are away from the computer for a longer amount of time.
On a Mac, dive into System Preferences and do the same adjustments on the DIsplay control panel.
Other Power Savers: Unplug perpherals like scanners, speakers or at least power them off when you are not using them. You can also get smart power strips to help monitor and conserve energy usage. Here are 10 tips for conserving computing power usage.
Bring your own coffee mug: If you are as much of a caffeine addict as I am, you have your coffee each day at your desk. Rather than use and toss a styrofoam cup (or more than one) each day, bring your own mug from home to reuse.
Check out your transportation options: There are several sites that provide information about mileage and energy consumption. See if you can find your car in the list.
Hybrid Center Comparison Chart - compare stats and features of selected hybrids with other hybrid and non-hybrid references
FuelEconomy.gov - a site from the US Environmental Protection Agency. Find and compare cars, get fuel economy tips and see gas prices around the country.
Recycle your white paper: There are collection bins all around the campuses for white paper. Collect paper at your desk and take it to the bin when you get a good collection.
Save Paper: Try creating PDF files and send those to folks rather than printouts. Consider using GreenPrint to select what pages to print and save paper that way.
Get Informed: Download the new eco-version of Flock. Flock is a dandy Web 2.0 savvy browser built on Firefox. This one comes pre-loaded with all kinds of environmental news sites and more. Plus, it’s GREEN!
More Environ-media and Info:
How to Compost - A Sierra Club Tip Video
Veggie Car - a short documentary about a car fueled with vegetable oil
A quick rundown of some of the April Fool’s shenanigans going on around the intertubes and a few classics. There have been some very funny bits created by and for the web.
Google has several new “options” today:
Custom Time for your emails (never send a late email again)
Create a paper airplane with Google Docs (see screenshot)
If you are reading this on the Technology Update blog (or in your RSS feed reader), then we have been successful with our upgrade: Wordpress (the blogging platform we use for this blog) is now at version 2.5
Wheee….nothing like a warmish spring day and some fresh new code!
Now, if only we can get Firefox 3 and the Scribefire add-on, which is a great way to write blog posts to be happy with each other and the blogs.
We had a great session this month with questions about Banner, the Luminis Content Management System (LCMS) that will be running our college website eventually, Outlook and more! Here are two demonstrations of interest to share with those who could not be there:
First - Installing the Barracuda Plug-in for Outlook
There is a plug-in you can install into Outlook on your computer that will give you two new buttons along the top right of Outlook. These buttons help you train the Barracuda Spam filter so it can identify spam even better. Here's a quick rundown of how to do it:Go to the Barracuda login page
Click on the Get Mail Client Plugins link (see below)
A new window will open. Click the “Download Now” button.
Open that downloaded file and install the plugin.Restart Outlook and you will see two new buttons at the top right. The red one is to identify spam and the green one is clear messages as not spam.
If you have upgraded to Office 2007, your Outlook client now includes the ability to read RSS feeds. RSS feeds (read more about them on the Technology Tuesday archive blog) are basically broadcasts from sites about when they are updated and what the new content contains so you can decide to read it or not. Most news sites, like CNN, have them as do all blogs and many other regularly updated sites. Here is how to add an RSS feed to your Outlook client.
In a nutshell,
locate the RSS feed on a page (look for the orange RSS logo or a link that says RSS feed)
Right click and copy the RSS feed URL (it will end with rss.xml or rss=2 or something else like that)
Go to Outlook and right click on the RSS folder down on the left below your email folders. Choose Add New RSS feed.
This is courtesy of the great work by the folks at Waxy.org as they digitize VHS tapes about the internet.
Wow..it is going to change the way we learn, work and play!!! Can’t wait to see how!
They cite 35-40 million people on the internet. I just checked and according to the Internet World Stats page the number now is closer to 1.3 billion.
We here at ETS are joining in the celebratory mood that is Graduation Day!!
Since we are hosting the 
