As we enter into the school year, there are a few changes and important points related to technology that LC instructors should be aware of. ITS has moved away from Symantec / Norton Anti-virus and Webroot SpySweeper in favor of Sophos, which does both. You can simply uninstall SpySweeper, and then go to Essential Stanford Software ( http://ess.stanford.edu) , download Sophos and install it. This installation will automatically uninstall Symantec / Norton Anti-virus. There are versions for both PC and Mac.
You now have 1GB of AFS space, up from 200MB, which, while you may use as you wish, could be used for securely storing restricted data, such as documents with student data. I would strongly suggest that you get as much student data off of your machines. While we are teachers and need to keep track of our students every quarter, there is no reason not to move data from previous quarters to more secure storage, like AFS, CD-ROMs or an outboard hard disk that is not usually connected. It is a tedious task to clean out your laptop, but it is a mobile device and therefore simply is not an appropriate place to keep student data. More information on AFS can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/services/afs/.
CourseWork has undergone some major changes since last fall. But first, a few reminders:
- When creating sites, set them up ONE AT A TIME (unless, of course, you want more than one class in a site).
- Don’t use the back button (ever).
- Save does not equal submit (unless you check the Auto-submission box in Settings)
- Post your syllabus by 9/20. The CW syllabus is now integrated with http://syllabus.stanford.edu and only accepts one document or set of text.
And my basic advice for CourseWork:
- Allow for student error (don’t set a Retract date, allow for multiple submissions, etc.)
- Set for Auto-submission.
- Check the settings.
- Preview every assignment.
The changes you should be aware of are:
- The recording applet has been greatly improved and now launches from a link, so you can put as many Audio Recording items on a page as you want. It will reliably submit recordings of up to 5 minutes.
- Auto-submission on the due date is now possible.
- It is now possible to edit a published assignment.
There are many more improvements – see the 2008 Improvements page on the LC Academic Technology Resource Website at http://lcatswiki.stanford.edu or the CW Release notes ( https://www.stanford.edu/group/coursework/cgi-bin/drupal/?q=node/123#f1)
For more details see my slides ( http://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/ats/LCTech2008.ppt)from the LC General Meeting on 9/15/2008. Also, for more general help with CourseWork and all the technology available to the Language Center, please visit the LC Academic Technology Resource Website at http://lcatswiki.stanford.edu. If you are interested in a Workshop, please check the schedule on the Resource Website and RSVP to me (kenro at stanford dot edu).