Information Technology Announcements

The new Microsoft purchasing agreement is ready for Students, Faculty and Staff to purchase software for personal computer use. 

Students should go to 2014 Microsoft Software Student Purchase.

Faculty and Staff should go to 2014 Microsoft Software Employee Purchase

A recent New York Times editorial by Henry L. Roediger III in the Gray Matter series titled "How Tests Make Us Smarter" examines how low-stakes quizzing helps people retain more of what they learn.

http://nyti.ms/1syMMKr

A recent Forbes article by Jordan Shapiro proposes that "We Need More EdTech, but Less Technology In the Classroom". 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2013/08/26/we-need-more-edtech-but-less-technology-in-the-classroom/

Robert Talbert's recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education "Four Things I Wish I Had Known About the Flipped Classroom" provides some good insights and considerations for flipped classroom teaching.

Bucknell University, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will host its first annual international digital scholarship conference. The theme of the conference is “Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Faculty Research” with the goal of gathering a broad community of scholar-practitioners engaged in collaborative digital scholarship in research and teaching.

If you receive a notice that ESET will soon expire, that is OK. IT Support Services is in the process of negotiating the renewal of the software license. Your ESET antivirus/anti-malware software will continue to work and we should have the license renewal process completed very shortly.

Any student who has not changed her or his Amherst password by noon today will be locked out of their account. Though you will not be able to access any Amherst systems (Moodel, the website, etc.), your old password will still allow you to log into the password-changing system and thus let you set a new password. 

Access the password-changing system.

To make it easier for phone and tablet users to log into web resources such as Moodle and the Amherst website, IT has enabled a show/hide password function on its web login page.

By default, your password is hidden on the web login page:

Pioneer Valley Soundscapes is a project that explores the connection between sound and place by documenting the musical communities and acoustic terrain of the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts.

The films, recordings, and images are produced by students at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst through semester-long collaborations with local musicians and partnerships with area communities.

Microsoft has released a patch via Windows Update to fix the recently discovered security vulnerability ("IE Zero Day") in Internet Explorer. The patch is available for all affected versions of Internet Explorer on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of  Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. In a surprise move, Microsoft also released the patch for Windows XP after telling the world that it would no longer patch XP after April 8th of this year.

Stop using the Internet Explorer web browser. Internet Explorer currently has a serious security vulnerability called IE Zero Day that allows attackers to install malware on your computer without your permission. That malware could be used to steal your personal data, track your online behavior, or gain control of the computer.

 Vidbolt is a new platform that allows users to easily annotate Youtube video and share comments either publicly or with a specific community.

Learn more from the Chronicle of Higher Education's review about how this can be a useful tool for teaching and learning.

Annotate Video on the Fly: A Review of Vidbolt

Some of our public computing spaces are now accessible 24/7 with ID card access:

• Center for Creative Technology Seeley Mudd
• Room 209 Merrill Sciences
• Keefe Science Library Merrill Sciences

Our computer lab machine availability information is now available on Amherst Mobile at m.amherst.edu. Save a link to m.amherst.edu on your smart phone or other mobile device to quickly check for computer availability.

IT Support Services has two openings for summer workers. You can apply using the online form.