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Students and faculty will enjoy improved technology inside 15 classrooms in Giedt, Olson and Everson halls starting this fall, thanks to upgrades made over the summer.

The changes include a much better sound system, improved wireless coverage, high-definition projection, room clocks connected to the internet, and adjustable ADA-compliant desks for the instructor.

‘Be the Geek,’ another way of saying ‘be the change,’ wins $5,000 campus grant

Some UC Davis online services will be unavailable during parts of Saturday, Sept. 9, while the campus corrects a problem with Data Center equipment through a software update. The plan is for two service outages, each approximately 5 to 30 minutes long, between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. If more interruptions are needed, information will be posted at status.ucdavis.edu.

The affected services include the myUCDavis web portal and Office 365 email accounts, although O365 accounts that are active when an interruption begins will continue to work.

For more information, see the status announcement. For service updates, including announcements when the work is finished, please see status.ucdavis.edu.

Students and faculty will enjoy improved technology inside 15 classrooms in Giedt, Olson and Everson halls starting this fall, thanks to upgrades made over the summer.

The retirement of SmartSite moves another step forward on Sept. 1, when the ability to use the service to create new project sites will end.
 
Rather than create a new site in a vanishing service, it’s time to choose an alternative. Several exist.
 
For more information, including a survey tool that can help identify alternatives for project sites, please see the projects transition web page. Read more about the transition from SmartSite to UC Davis Canvas at movetocanvas.ucdavis.edu.

If you manage technology at UC Davis, keep an eye out for the yearly Cyber Safety Survey. It should come your way soon.

The survey takes the pulse of information security at UC Davis, and has two versions this year. The standard edition, with approximately 90 questions, is usually completed by the IT directors of high-level campus units. The shorter version, with about 24 questions, is mostly for faculty who use computers or devices that aren’t managed by IT staff.

The goal is to identify trends and common problems across UC Davis; measure progress in campus cybersecurity; and find the areas with the most risk so that the Information Security Office (ISO) can work with units to reduce that risk.

If you own a project site in SmartSite and need ideas for replacing it now that SmartSite is ending, check out the new survey tool at smartsiteprojects.ucdavis.edu. It suggests alternatives based on what you want to accomplish.

Many of the alternatives are collaboration services that didn’t exist when SmartSite debuted in 2006, and are a better fit for certain purposes than SmartSite is.

See if this would be useful to you: a day of workshops, talks and sessions about teaching and technology, customized for UC Davis faculty, and led by a campus colleague or expert. UC Davis has recently adopted Canvas as its main learning management system, so exploring Canvas should be a theme.

And the event should be free, conveniently located, and, what the heck, include a complimentary lunch.

If you teach with UC Davis Canvas, this news should interest you: Instructure is adding features and making improvements to DocViewer, the new annotation tool that has replaced Crocodoc in Canvas.

Instructors use annotation tools to comment on students’ coursework, typically as part of grading. (The Canvas grading tool is SpeedGrader.)

If you can’t get internet access on campus beginning this Thursday, check the wi-fi setting on your device. If it’s still trying to use moobilenetx, that will likely be the problem. Moobilenetx won’t be working anymore.

On Thursday, June 22, the campus is retiring moobilenetx in favor of eduroam, a secure wireless service that can also be used at thousands of universities, airports, and other public sites worldwide.

The campus is retiring moobilenetx on June 22, so it’s time to switch to eduroam.

An email version of this message from the IT Express Service Desk is being distributed to the campus on May 10.

A few recent phishing scams aimed at UC Davis have looked more convincing than usual, so please be alert.

A few recent phishing scams aimed at UC Davis have looked more convincing than usual, so please be alert.

Before students say goodbye to SmartSite at the end of spring quarter 2017, there’s one more thing they should do: Save copies of any coursework stored in SmartSite that they want to keep from their previous classes.

They can retrieve copies until July 14 (see instructions). After spring quarter wraps up, UC Davis will stop using SmartSite for instruction, and students will not have access to anything stored in old SmartSite course sites.

Two experts in advanced cybersecurity will speak at UC Davis this June. Admission is free, and everyone is welcome.

In the first talk, a security expert at one of the world’s top technology companies will discuss trends that involve cybersecurity and “cognitive computing”—roughly speaking, technology that attempts to mimic the human brain.

In the second presentation, the chief security and trust officer at a California company that makes security software and uses machine learning techniques will address “The Promises and Perils of Emerging Technologies for Cybersecurity.”