CLASSROOMS and LABS
Classrooms are ready for faculty testing! If you are interested in meeting a member of the classroom technology staff in a typical classroom to answer any questions you may have, please contact Tammy Hanek at x4692 or via email at thanek@carleton.edu.
We’ve updated a number of applications, such as Flash, Adobe Reader, Chrome, and Firefox, to their current versions. The Macs are all running MacOS 10.12.6 Sierra, and the Windows computers are all running an updated version of Windows 10. Microsoft Office is unchanged at version 2016.We’ve also made some changes to the hardware in some classrooms. All of the projectors in the LDC have been upgraded; Leighton 330 has a new projector and all new electronics. Boliou 104 has been upgraded with a laser projector, making it significantly brighter, and it now has a full-screen mode as well as the ability to project only above the blackboard.
Weitz 235 has been reconfigured, including adjustable height wall-mounted monitors, a dual-boot Mac Mini at each table, and an improved switching system; if you would like an introduction to the room, please contact Jim Pierret at x7006 or via email at jpierret@carleton.edu. In addition, there were a number of changes made to the science teaching spaces as part of the preparation for the science complex, such as moving a number of classrooms to the lower level of the MDRC.
IMPROVED CLASSROOM TESTING PROCESS
More than 10 ITS Professional Staff have checked each of the 90 rooms on campus that have teaching and projection equipment in them. Our testing touches on many different aspects of the rooms, from ensuring that sound plays through the room speakers from both the Mac and Windows sides of the instructor stations to making sure the correct adapters are in each room and the external connections work. You can find a complete list of all the items we test here. If there are specific features of a software package that your teaching depends on, we strongly recommend taking a few minutes and going to the classroom you’ll be teaching in to test those features.
MOODLE CHANGES
We also have a few important reminders concerning Moodle for this academic year.
- All courses start out hidden from students. Please click the “Show course to students” link in the Administration block to make your course site available to your students.
- If you teach 2 or more sections of the same course in the same term, you will now also see a 3rd course site including your family name. You can use this third site to host content for all sections so you don’t have to maintain to (nearly) identical sites. To make it available to your students, you will need to add the individual sections via the “Meta-link Enrollment Methods”. See this page for details on how to use the Meta-link enrollment method.
- Moodle Documentation is now even easier to find and integrated with our Moodle server. Click the “Moodle docs for this page” link in the far bottom right of any Moodle page to get information about how to use that Moodle page. Or visit our new Carleton Moodle Docs site for more info.
- There are several new features with this year’s Moodle version, please see my What’s New in Moodle blog post for details!f
- ITS is expanding Moodle support! Starting with the fall term the ITS Helpdesk staff and students will be able to answer more questions about Moodle, which means that Moodle support is expanded to the hours that the Helpdesk is open. See details on Moodle support availability on the Moodle page in the ITS Catalog of Services.