Office of Educational Technology
December 2015 OET Newsletter
Happy Holidays
Wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year! The Office of Educational Technology.
Professional and Continuing Studies Website
Congratulations to our own Joe Naccarato who worked with a team from Professional & Continuing Studies to redesign the PCS website. The site won a bronze UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association) Marketing Award.
Toner Take Away
Don’t throw away that toner cartridge! We recycle used toner cartridges for charity. If you have used toner cartridges that you’d like us to pick up, send us an email.
Your H: Drive
When given the choice of saving files to the cloud, your computer’s hard drive or the H: drive, OET recommends saving to H. Your H: drive is on OET’s server which is backed up at regular intervals per the CEHD backup policy. So if you accidently delete a file that you worked on last week, OET can restore the file for you. Files stored on OET servers are not bound by third-party privacy policies that may impact data security.
If you need to share a folder with someone else, either on- or off-campus, we can create a folder for your project and assign permissions to all who need access. In addition, you can access your H: drive when you are on-campus through UDel Secure or an Ethernet connection or off-campus with UD’s Cisco AnyConnect VPN.
Time to Upgrade?
If you’d like to upgrade your computer to Windows 10 or OS X El Capitan, the latest operating systems, contact OET to make an appointment. We will assess your computer to see if it has the necessary system requirements before we upgrade. At the present time, we support Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10 and OS X 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10 for the Macintosh. Although it’s not mandatory that you upgrade if you run a supported operating system, upgrading often solves compatibility issues with other software and maximizes the length of manufacturer update support.
Educational App of the Month: Plotagon
Put your students in the writer, director, and producer seats with Plotagon. With Plotagon, create animated stories with customized avatars, sound effects, emotions, music, and audio. Once you create a story, save it to your Plotagon storage or publish and share it on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Plotagon has built-in closed captioning and is free; however, more characters and environments are available with the paid version. If you’d like to use Plotagon for an entire class, the cost per year is $30 for an education subscription that provides private space so only those in the class can see and comment on class videos. It is available for Windows, Macintosh, iPhone, iPad.