CTC Ed Tech News November 13, 2013

Dear faculty and staff,

Here's a smorgasbord for you this week:

Take your medicine

Bill, our IT person at University Center, wanted me to remind you to take your medicine, I mean, to do your computer updates. This is one of the best ways to keep your computer and your data safe (along with good passwords). So, do Bill and yourself a favor: Pick a time when you can let the computer do its thing and do your Window updates, Microsoft updates, Java updates, and Adobe updates. Read a real book, magazine, text book, or grade papers  while you monitor the progress. "Pretty please with sugar on top," says Bill.

Intro to Blackboard 9.1, Service Pack 13 

Friday, November 15, noon-1:30 pm. This webinar delivered via Collaborate will go over some of the new features that will come with our Blackboard upgrade in December. I have been experimenting with it and really like the new text editor, improvements in the tests deployment, discussion board, blogs, and wikis. The new inline grading is really, really cool. I will host an in-person overview of SP 13 in December

Remember, IT Services plans to take Blackboard down from December 20 through 29 for the upgrade.  

New Resource from the Library

Librarian Christie Ericson sent this to the Faculty Listserv on November 13:

The Consortium Library has recently subscribed to a new service for reading electronic journals. BrowZine is a new tablet application that allows you to browse, read, and stay current with thousands of the library's top scholarly journals in a format optimized for your iPad, Android, or Kindle Fire tablet.With BrowZine, you can:

• Browse and read journals:  browse journals by subject, easily review tables of contents, and download full articles
• Create your own bookshelf:  add journals to your personal bookshelf and be notified when new articles are published (note: push notification begins mid-November for iPads, January for Android)
• Save and export articles:  Save articles for off-line reading or export to services such as RefWorks, Zotero, and more

Learn more and start using BrowZine today.