ITS Newsletter

Web Services is pleased to announce that we will be launching the new faculty/staff and student gateways in WordPress within the next week or so.

Say hello to three new staff members — Samantha, Babi and Emerita. Welcome to ITS!

In June 2020, my end-of-year note addressed the issue of George Floyd’s murder and the associated unrest in the country. I want to report back on steps being taken in ITS.

Now that there appears to be an end to the COVID pandemic in sight, let’s take a moment to reflect, with relief, on what we are willing to let go and what we recognize will remain useful for 21^st century equitable teaching and learning, back on campus.

ITS has a new online home in WordPress! The first thing you’ll notice is that the homepage has been modernized to make it easier to get to the information you’re looking for.

My colleague Paige Francis said, “Not one investment we’ve made throughout COVID-19 from a technology standpoint was an outlier. We simply reprioritized and escalated tasks and projects. Our strategy and vision – pandemic aside – remain shockingly the same.” I couldn’t agree more.

The move to teaching and learning online has made us all more acquainted with new and different tools for our work. Usually, we think of software in this category, but there are also new hardware tools being explored by faculty and staff.

Most campus departments are now using WordPress as their web platform. That raises both a need to make sure that site maintainers have a good foundation, and a desire for opportunities for more exploration of what’s possible in WordPress.

Paul Bernhardt, from Cinema and Media Studies, has been exploring the use of Gravity Forms on the CAMS website. “What’s different about building forms with Gravity,” says Paul, “is the ability to easily add conditional logic to each question, as well as the emails the form can automatically generate.”

Slack provides a generalized environment for team coordination and communication, and it is being actively used at Carleton, not only for classes, but also by some departments like ITS, for their internal operations (see screenshots).