ITS Newsletter

Here are some recommendations for summer reading, both fiction and non-fiction, brought to you by your colleagues in ITS and the library!

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).

The Carleton community has embraced a lot of new technology over the past eight months. During this time, ITS staff have put together a number of training opportunities. Here’s a buffet of short tutorials the staff offered during one week in December.

We are returning to campus during unsettling times. I have ideas about which changes will persist, but for now, this ‘welcome back’ newsletter will focus on updates about Carleton’s technology environment that are relevant for Fall Term. 

Welcome and welcome back to Carleton! This term will see a significant increase in the use of all of our information technology systems.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, ITS has been working hard to make our learning and teaching spaces as safe as we can, and to ensure that students have access to software even when they can’t visit physical computer labs. 

ITS continuously invests in preventing user-visible problems, but when issues inevitably do arise we want to make sure you hear about them quickly. Read more about how to access the new Service Status page and to subscribe to the TechAlert system.