InfoTech Tuesday

K-State will test K-State Alerts (formerly known as the Emergency Text Messaging System), starting at 10 a.m. Wednesday, November 19, to ensure the service is functioning properly.  Feedback is needed from all K-Staters who enabled this service, since K-State cannot guarantee that alerts will be received, or how quickly they will be received.  An e-mail will be sent after the test to gather this information.  K-State Alerts users who do not receive the test alert should contact the IT Help Desk at helpdesk@k-state.edu or 785-532-7722.

More information about K-State Alerts is available on the K-State Alerts FAQs.

Note: This weekly post serves to answer questions submitted via the K-State Zimbra website and InfoTech Tuesday, update the K-State community with new project information, and detail Zimbra features.

I’ve noticed that Zimbra has a built-in instant messaging (IM) client. Will this feature be available to K-Staters?

It is unlikely that Instant Message will be available during the initial Zimbra e-mail implementation and centrally supported @ksu.edu and @k-state.edu mailbox migration because Instant Messaging is still in the beta stages of development at Zimbra. K-State will offer this feature when it completes the beta development and becomes a production offering.

Go to the Zimbra E-Mail and Calendaring Collaboration Suite website to read frequently asked questions and to submit your comments to the K-State Zimbra project team.

A self-paced, online tutorial, iSIS Training - including iSIS Grade Submission, is available for all K-State Online primary instructors. A link to the course can be found at the very bottom of the K-State Online course organizer - under the section labeled Student.

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The Information Technology Assistance Center and the Office of Mediated Education are hosting a drop-in demonstration of a system for recording classroom lectures.  The system can upload presentations to a USB drive or external hard drive in a fraction of the time of previous systems. Faculty and staff are encouraged to try out the system during regular business hours from noon Monday, Nov. 17-noon Wednesday, Nov. 19, in Hale 212. Cytek Media Systems of Topeka designed and loaned the system to K-State for these demonstrations. For more information, contact Kevin Shippy, 785-532-3343, or Tim Bagby, 785-532-4919.

A K-State Second Life Academic Users Group is being formed. The first meeting is scheduled at noon Thursday, Nov. 20, in Union Stateroom 1 and is open to the educational community. The purpose of the group is to allow current and potential SL users to share project information and enhance their Second Life knowledge and skills.

An informational flier (PDF) is being circulated to the campus. For more information about Second Life, contact Larry Jackson, ljackson@k-state.edu.

Many K-State Online instructors are surprised to find they are students in a number of courses that have been made available to all system instructors, including an iSIS training course.  Instructors who have a large number of courses on their organizers may not have seen these courses because they are listed at the bottom of the course organizer -  way below all the courses they are instructors in.  One solution to this problem is to hide the courses you are not currently using, so they don’t appear on your organizer.  Hiding a course does not delete the course nor does it remove you from the course - it just hides it until you choose to show it again. To hide one or more courses, do the following:

1. On your course Organizer, click the Preferences tab.
2. In the Hide column, select the check boxes next to the courses you want to hide.
3. Click the Save Preferences button.

To show hidden courses, click the hide/show link at the top of your organizer.

Ever have challenges with citing references, both in-text and in the bibliographical list that follows? Microsoft Word 2007 offers a references tool that may make this task easier. The References Tab on the MS Word 2007 Ribbon offers many options for working with references in a document.

The Table of Contents feature allows the automated building and updating of these contents, which comes in handy for larger documents.

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I missed the Course Accessibility workshops,  is the information available online?

There is a video available from: http://www.k-state.edu/dss/k-access/Trainings_Articles.html