Alternate computing facilities are available at UW Seattle—in Suzzallo, Allen, and other libraries—while Odegaard Undergraduate Library (OUGL) is closed for renovations, June 9 to September 23. During this time, a new STF-funded laptop checkout service will be located with the Media Center in Suzzallo. Computer Vet services will move to the Allen Library Research Commons. Video editing and graphics workstations are available in the Mary Gates Hall Media Studio. Poster plotting services will be removed permanently after June 15; see Creative Communications for alternatives. These renovations will bring state-of-the-art active learning spaces and classrooms to OUGL for Autumn Quarter 2013.

Learn how to use the photo and video editing software in Creative Suite 6 (CS6) at free workshops with Adobe experts on May 23 at UW Seattle. Three CS6 sessions, hosted by UW-IT's workshop program, are being offered: Premiere and After Effects (9:30–11:30 a.m.), Basic Photoshop (2:30–4:30 p.m.), and Advanced Photoshop (7:00–9:00 p.m.). Current UW students, faculty, and staff can get details and sign up to ensure a place.

The popular UW Computer Science and Engineering Colloquia series is back with all-new shows exclusively on UWTV channel 27 and UWTV.org. Tune in on-air or online to hear talks by leading computer scientists and engineers that include Crowd-Powered Systems, Challenges of Data Efficiency, and Crowd Computations.

UW graduate students now submit their theses and dissertations online rather than by paper, saving money and streamlining administrative steps. After a pilot in the fall, submissions began Spring Quarter 2012 and eliminated the required $25 binding fee, plus additional costs for printing and microfilming. Read the UW Graduate School blog to learn more.

UW instructors can find tools and resources to help them continue teaching when campus is closed, due to snow or other interruptions, with the recently updated Academic Continuity Toolkit (ACT). The ACT provides guidance on putting course materials online, communicating with students, and online methods for students to collaborate. It now includes Tegrity lecture capture, WordPress, and new UW Google Apps, reflecting the most current ways instructors can ensure that teaching and learning continue. See how you can event-proof your courses.

A new gaming policy is being implemented on a test basis at UW Seattle’s Odegaard Learning Commons (OUGL) in response to numerous complaints by students unable to access a computer to complete their academic work. Effective May 1, gaming is prohibited on computers in OUGL from 11:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. daily. Students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to take a brief confidential survey to provide feedback on the policy, which will be reviewed this summer.

UW instructors and students are discovering the advantages of using Tegrity, a lecture capture system. Cheryl Kerfeld in rehabilitation medicine used Tegrity for her online physical therapy course and was excited by its user-friendliness and note-taking features for students. Economics lecturer Haideh Salehi-Esfahani, after a brief orientation by UW-IT, used Tegrity to easily record her lectures and exam review sessions for her 800 student class. Student feedback was positive; they liked seeing both an image of her and a larger image of the document she was working on. Read more and get started with Tegrity.

Get short, easy-to-access, online information security and privacy training from the UW Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Passwords and Passphrases provides guidelines and best practices on creating strong passwords, geared for audiences at both UW and Seattle Children’s. Best practices for handling UW records that contain Social Security Numbers are detailed in SSN Use at the UW, developed with the UW Office of the Registrar. Access the training.

Students in two courses this quarter are using online textbooks through the UW-IT eText pilot, and more classes can be involved.  Faculty can get more information and sign up to be part of the eText pilot by April 25 for Summer classes and by May 25 for Autumn classes. Usable on any computer or device with a modern browser, eTexts include full text search, highlighting, and note-taking tools for students. This pilot is part of UW’s 2y2d Teaching & Learning in the 21st Century Initiative, and will help in understanding the potential of this technology.

UW staff can brush up on workplace software and other productivity tools through live Webinars offered by UW Professional & Organizational Development (POD). These instructor-led Webinars on Microsoft Office and Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, and other topics are made possible at significant savings through POD’s partnership with content provider People-OnTheGo. Get details and register online.

Need to make a Web site, edit images and video, or troubleshoot your computer? Get help with free computing workshops from UW-IT, aimed at beginner and intermediate levels. Hands-on experience with professional tools includes Adobe Photoshop and Creative Suite, iMovie and Final Cut, Sound Studio technology, HTML and MySQL, and more. Workshops are held in Mary Gates Hall or Odegaard Undergraduate Library, and run one or two hours. Walk-in with your student, faculty, or staff UW NetID and Husky card, or sign up online to ensure your seat.

MyPlan, an online academic planning tool in development for Fall, will provide UW students with a new option for developing a multi-year academic plan, searching for and tracking courses, assessing their progress toward a degree, and having more productive discussions with their advisers. In addition to conducting usability tests with students, the MyPlan team is seeking feedback from undergraduate and graduate advising staff and have scheduled live MyPlan demos for them on April 6 and April 11, and a Webinar demo for graduate advisers on March 29. Information on the demos and MyPlan is online. This effort is part of the UW’s 2y2d Teaching & Learning in the 21st Century Initiative.

Insight into UW Seattle student and faculty technology use and trends, gleaned from recent surveys, is now available online. The Report on the 2011 Faculty, Teaching Assistant, and Student Surveys illuminates patterns of technology use and identifies unmet needs that help inform future campus technology decisions. The surveys are conducted every three years at UW Seattle. This effort is part of the UW’s 2y2d Teaching & Learning in the 21st Century Initiative. Key takeaways include: student proficiency with and access to technology is high, students use technology to support their learning beyond what instructors require, and students and instructors use educational technologies to make large classes more manageable and to increase collaboration and communication.

UW students can now access all the Adobe Creative Suite software—Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, and more—online 24/7 using ViDA (Virtual Desktop Access), right from the comfort of home, dorm, or coffee shop. ViDA works on laptops, iPads, iPhones, Androids—almost any Internet-connected device. More software is coming soon, thanks to UW-IT and the Student Technology Fee Committee partnership. This effort is part of the UW’s 2y2d Teaching & Learning in the 21st Century Initiative.

This academic year, 108 UW faculty on all three campuses have been involved in piloting Canvas, a feature-rich learning management system. They’ve been teaching nearly 6000 students in 88 courses—from chemistry to sociology—using the new tool. Canvas simplifies course management activities like calendaring and grading, while providing ways to collaborate and deliver materials to students. UW-IT and the Office of Educational Assessment are evaluating Canvas as part of a broader effort to improve the student experience. Learn more.

If you missed the January Ignite! event on innovative uses of technology for teaching and learning at the UW, watch the videos online. Get key findings from UW-IT's Surveys on Teaching, Learning, and Research Technologies. See presentations about using Canvas learning management system to hold virtual office hours; SQLShare to analyze extremely large data sets with students; back-channel chat to keep students in large courses focused; and Tegrity lecture capture to simplify review of course material.

Learn about innovative uses of technology at the UW for teaching and learning at the upcoming Ignite! event. Hear 5-minute talks from UW faculty about using the Canvas eLearning system to hold virtual office hours, SQLShare to analyze extremely large data sets, back-channel chat to keep students engaged and more, with a brief Q&A after each presentation. Key findings from UW-IT’s 2011 Triennial Surveys on Teaching, Learning, and Research Technologies will be presented, and Canvas, MyPlan, Tegrity, and Yarn will be available for hands-on demos. It’s January 25, 3:00 p.m. in UW Seattle’s Odegaard Undergraduate Library, Room 220. Get details.

Starting Spring Quarter, UW professors and lecturers can participate in a UW-IT electronic text (eText) pilot in one or more of their classes to experiment with this new technology, help improve student learning, and contribute to this research effort. Two eText platforms (CourseSmart and CourseLoad) are provided, allowing flexibility and side-by-side comparison. Attend an informational meeting on January 26 at 9:30 a.m. in Odegaard Undergraduate Library 220 or February 1 at 3:30 p.m. in Mary Gates Hall 241, both at UW Seattle, or send email to help@uw.edu. During the pilot, students will receive eTexts at no cost. Get details.

This quarter, UW instructors who teach with laptops can try out a new technology that supports teaching and learning. Tegrity, a cloud-based lecture capture service, lets instructors easily record lectures and other class activities from a laptop (or any device with a Web connection). Then students can review the materials online using a Web browser or mobile device. Learn more.

WebQ now provides greater participant management features so you can track who has started, viewed, or submitted your online survey, and when. You can use WebQ to quickly build and administer online surveys and quizzes, and either view results online or download them for further analysis. WebQ is one of the Catalyst Web Tools, designed to aid communication and collaboration in teaching, learning, research, and everyday work for anyone in the UW community. Learn more about tracking survey participation.

Enhance your skills using Microsoft Access, Excel, .NET, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Visio, and many more Microsoft products through UW-provided (so no cost to you) access to the Microsoft IT Academy Online Learning Program, through October 2012. In addition to hundreds of video-based Microsoft E-Learning courses, you can access the Microsoft Digital Literacy program to learn basic computer skills. For more information, go to Microsoft IT Academy at the UW.

Light a spark this winter with an "Ignite!" session on new technologies that improve the student learning experience at the UW. Come hear five-minute presentations from UW faculty and students sharing stories, ideas, lessons, and strategies for using these tools. Look to the January issue of IT Connect News for the exact date and time; you can also subscribe to the RSS news feed to find out first.

UW-IT is engaging faculty and students in the rollout of Tegrity, a cloud-based lecture capture service. Using a computer, camera and microphone, faculty can easily record and publish lectures online. Students can view the recorded content using a Web browser or mobile device. With Tegrity, it’s easy to search keywords within a recording, make and share notes, and add bookmarks. Currently, this service is only available to instructors and students in credit-based UW courses. Future releases will expand usage and access. Learn more.

Students in the UW’s DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology) program are featured in a series of 12 UWTV videos. They speak about the adapted environments and technologies that help them have equal access to learning and employment opportunities. Some of these individuals are in the DO-IT Scholars program, where high school students attend Summer Study sessions at the UW to prepare for college and careers.

Beginning Summer Quarter 2011, all UW faculty and instructors are required to submit final grades online and can do so quickly and easily with a new Catalyst Web Tool, GradePage. For those not already using Catalyst GradeBook, available since 2009 for optional online grade submission, GradePage provides a simple alternative. It was developed by UW-IT with the Office of the Registrar, and instructors can access GradePage from MyUW.

Faced with reduced support staff last fall, the School of Social Work faculty took control of their own course Web site content. By leveraging UW-hosted Catalyst CommonView, and with a little help from UW-IT for customized training sessions, faculty created their own online course materials for 61 classes. Learn how the School and its two-person IT team created this successful model of sustainable course support in this Profile of Technology Use.

College faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and students considering careers in STEM disciplines are encouraged to apply for the Education Program at the SC11 conference, held November 12-15 in Seattle. The program aims to help integrate high performance computing and computational science and engineering techniques into the classroom and research. You can request the $380 registration fee be covered when you apply by July 31. See the sample application.

"Catalyst has fundamentally expanded the opportunities and strategies I have to teach our students," says Dr. John Wataha, chair of the Department of Restorative Dentistry. He chose to use Catalyst because he knew the UW was moving toward a campus-wide online grade submission system, he’d found the tools intuitive and easy to use, and that as a University-wide system Catalyst would be well supported. Read how he leverages CommonView, GoPost, and WebQ to develop his students’ potential in his Profile of Technology Use.

Throughout Spring Quarter, UW-IT will offer a wide variety of free computing workshops. Topics include Web publishing and computing fundamentals, as well as multimedia and productivity software from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and others. Full schedule and detailed workshop descriptions are online. All workshops are taught by student-instructors. Most are walk-in; just bring your UW NetID and Husky card, or sign up to ensure a seat.

UW Information School Professor Mike Eisenberg combines Catalyst Tools and other smart technologies to engage students and encourage classroom participation. Students work in groups to create multimedia presentations that inspire them to interact with information and ideas in new ways. Read about Eisenberg’s strategies and lessons learned in integrating technology into course design and other Profiles of Technology Use at the UW.

A sample of UW Seattle faculty, students, and TAs soon will be invited to share their technology needs and priorities in the 2011 Surveys on Teaching, Learning, and Research Technologies. If you receive the email from UW Information Technology, please take the 15-minute survey. Your input will help inform future decisions about technology tools and services.

UW students are invited to submit ideas on a new Catalyst mobile Web application aimed at making group studying easier, such as locating group study spaces. This tool will be optimized for mobile devices, but will also be accessible through standard Web browsers. Please provide feedback to UW Information Technology on this topic by taking a two-minute survey today.

Online training on Microsoft software is free to Washington residents through a state WorkSource career development program with Microsoft. More than 1,000 courses are provided, including technical training for IT professionals (with certifications available) and digital literacy for computer beginners.

UW psychology professor Jaime Diaz uses Catalyst Web Tools and other Web technologies to enhance lectures, engage students, expand the classroom, and collect feedback. The use of technology "breaks that time boundary...you can make the class smaller, you can make the class richer," says Diaz. Read his Profile of Technology Use, provided by UW-IT.

Learn about Web publishing, digital audio/video, document creation, computing fundamentals, spreadsheets, graphics, presentations, and more. UW-IT is offering seventy free workshops Autumn Quarter. Most are walk-in; just bring your UW NetID and Husky card. See details and schedule.

UW research findings on technology are the topic of two recently published journal articles. The role of technological expertise, gender, and age and how they relate to the use of educational technologies are discussed in a Journal of Computing in Higher Education article, and a new EDUCAUSE Quarterly article recommends that universities consider the whole campus as a single learning environment. In addition, three new research reports provide recommendations for a campus-wide student technology strategy as well as detailed findings on UW Seattle students' technology needs and mobile device use.

Paccar Hall, a new state-of-the-art building at the UW Foster School of Business, features U-shaped tiered classrooms, student breakout rooms, offices, meeting spaces, an auditorium, and an atrium with café. Technology enhancements include Web-linked digital monitors and distance conferencing capabilities. As part of the project team, UW Information Technology set up more than 750 new Ethernet connections and worked to bring voice and wireless to the building. Take a virtual tour or read a news story.

Check out the new campus-wide electronic portfolio solution -- the "Google Sites Hub" -- in CommonView. This solution enables instructors and students to build and share rich electronic portfolios using the Google Sites page creation tools, and helps instructors to manage the process through the Catalyst Web Tools. Also new to CommonView is public views and announcements in a workspace. And new to Your Groups, you can now include lists of people when creating or editing a group to control access to your Catalyst tools.

It's easier to manage your courses online using the Catalyst Web Tools features added this year, and more enhancements are planned. Learn how these and cloud computing resources will contribute to a UW eLearning platform, and discuss how the university portal and mobile applications fit in. Sign up for a one-hour open house in July or August.

Curious about Adobe Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, or Dreamweaver? Learn about them at UW Information Technology's workshops for UW students and staff. Workshops on Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and digital audio tools are also offered, all at UW Seattle. See the summer schedule.

The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) recently published a case study authored by LST and the UW eScience Institute. Titled Scientific Advances and Information Technology: Meeting Researchers’ Needs in a New Era of Discovery, the report discusses key findings of two University of Washington research projects: Conversations with UW Research Leaders, and the UW 2008 Faculty Survey on Learning and Scholarly Technologies. Get details.

As of June 30, UW Information Technology (UW-IT) will no longer offer its UW Computer Training program. Walk-in workshops geared toward students will still be offered on digital audio and video, Web publishing, graphics and presentations, the Catalyst Web Tools, and other computing fundamentals. Custom workshops can be arranged.

LST's high-end videoconference studios offer significantly more functionality than either online technologies or desktop equipment. Featuring professional technical support through the entirety of your event, these flexible studios can connect you with up to 20 standards-based videoconference sites at one time. Let LST staff focus on the technology so you can focus on the topic.

UW Professional & Continuing Education administers certificate programs, graduate and undergraduate degrees, and courses on weekends, evenings, and online. Computing & IT has 7 certificates (such as application development, information management), 9 master's degrees (such as computing & software systems, digital media), plus courses/short programs. See the new Web site and update your links.

Learn about Web publishing, digital audio/video, document creation, computing fundamentals, spreadsheets, graphics, and presentations. Learning & Scholarly Technologies is offering over forty free workshops this quarter. Most are walk-in; just bring your UW NetID and Husky card. See details and schedule.

RSVP for the Computing & IT Programs Open House, and learn about the certificate and master's degree programs in this field offered by UW Professional & Continuing Education. Hear from instructors and advisors, meet students in the programs, and see coursework samples on Thursday, April 22, 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. at UW Tower Auditorium and Cafeteria.

Did you know that UW staff, faculty, alumni, affiliates, and students are eligible to register for a UW Computer Training Online Learning Subscription? It's convenient and available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from any computer with Internet access. Microsoft Office 2007 and other instructor-led courses are also available. Check out their spring schedule and register today.