TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

As of October 30, 2009, you have 100 MB of space allotted to your blog. This increased quota, the previous quota was 50 MB, will allow you to store more images, videos, and other files with your blog. Enjoy!

Faculty can contact the OIT Help Desk for information about increasing their quota beyond 100 MB. 

More on the Blogs at UMass Amherst Service

In the second of our two-part podcast series “Catching Up with Emerging Technologies” Tony and Fred discuss two OIT services: the online file storage tool UDrive, and the Blogs at UMass Amherst service. What are the best ways to use these tools and how are instructors using them? Listen and find out!

TeachOIT-Podcast-03-EmergingTech2.mp3

TeachOIT Podcast Episode 03: UDrive and UMass Blogs

Learn more:

UDrive: easy-to-use, Web-based file storage and sharing system. 

Blogs at UMass Amherst:OIT’s blogging service is open to all students, faculty, and staff at UMass Amherst. 

Podcast Opening/Closing music is “The Future Soon” by Jonathan Coulton, used under a Creative Commons license. 

If you’ve set up a UMass Blog to document your research or teaching, you might be interested to know who your visitors are. The days of the simple hit counter are gone, replaced with Google Analytics, a Google tool that tracks a wealth of data about where your visitors are coming from, which sections of your blog they are reading, and how often are they returning. 

Here’s how to enable Google Anayltics on your blog, (instructions via Kevin Skelly’s OIT Software Support Blog)

1. Log in to the administrative dashboard of your blog.
2. Click the Plugins link (at the right hand side of the banner.)
3. Click Activate to the right of Ultimate Google Analytics.
4. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/
5. Click the Access Analytics button.
6. To the right of Website Profiles click Add New Profile.
7. Enter the URL of your blog. The http:// is already supplied, so enter the rest of the URL e.g. “blogs.umass.edu/YourUsername”.
8. Click Finish.
9. Select the string that looks like UA-#######-# and copy it.
10. Return to your blog dashboard and click Settings (at top right).
11. Click Ultimate GA under the banner.
12. The box labeled Account ID should now have that same number in it, but if it doesn’t, you can paste it in now.
13. Click Update Options.
14. After some people have visited your blog, you can go back to Google Analytics and click “View report” in the line next to where your blogs website is displayed. This will take you to the report for your blog, where you will be able to see how much activity your blog has received.

Tried building a web site from scratch but never quite finished? Never have the time to slog through programs like Dreamweaver to update your existing site? Maybe setting up a blog is the answer.

Many instructors are finding blogs to be a friendlier alternative to building a traditional course website. The UMass Blogs service provides a space for you to construct a blog using the popular WordPress blogging system. Most people find setting up (and updating!) a blog quick and easy. This lets you focus on the important things; the content you want to put on the web, not wrangling with the tools for getting it there.

Here are some example course blogs in full swing for Spring 2009:

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The Office of Information Technologies (OIT) will be performing a major upgrade to our Blogs at UMass Amherst service on Wednesday, January 7, 2009. The new version of Blogs comes with big improvements to the software’s interface and a revised list of supported themes, widgets, and plugins. more…

Nick and Michele just finished pulling together some data on the use of the UMass Blogs service for the Fall semester:

72 instructors have attended one of our recent blogging workshops!

Of the almost 300 blogs that have been worked on this semester, there are:

• 54 course blogs (see some examples)
• 11 faculty professional/research blogs
• 41 student academic blogs being maintained for course work
• 34 student personal blogs
• 15 student organization/club blogs
• 7 Departmental blogs with news and announcements

Interested in setting up your own blog for a course or to talk about your research? Join us for the next “Getting Started with UMass Blogs” on Monday November 17th. Register for the workshop online at: http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php?s=08-nov

Tried building a web site from scratch but never quite finished? Never have the time to slog through programs like Dreamweaver to update your existing site? Maybe setting up a blog is the answer.

Many instructors are finding blogs to be a friendlier alternative to building a traditional course website. The UMass Blogs service provides a space for you to construct a blog using the popular WordPress blogging system. Most people find setting up (and updating!) a blog quick and easy. This lets you focus on the important things; the content you want to put on the web, not wrangling with the tools for getting it there.

Check out the links below to see some live examples of Fall 2008 course blogs created by instructors who have attended one of Academic Computing “Getting Started with Blogs” workshops:

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We have added a “Getting Started with Blogs” workshop to our September workshop list. It is scheduled for Wednesday September 17th 1:20-3:20. If you are looking for an easy way to build a web presence for a course or your research the UMass Blogs tool is worth exploring!

Registration is online at:
http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php

This February, OIT introduced a Blogging service to the campus in a low-key beta release (meaning that we didn’t advertise it and we tell all users that policies and features may change by the time it is officially released.) In the first month we had over 500 blogs created. Most seem to be “hello world” posts with very little content. Most of the active blogs are by students and record social activities and political musings. There are a few that show how blogs can be used in support of academic pursuits:

• A course blog with a very simple purpose: each post asks if there are any questions about an exam, students post their questions as comments.
• A blog for majors in a department to get announcements and updates and post comments on various topics.
• A faculty blog containing the musings of a faculty member on topics related to his specialty.
• A blog by a graduate student commenting on articles and books she has read as part of her thesis development.
• A research blog posting updates on research activities.
• A poetry blog with regular posts of a student’s writings.

Our primary purpose for introducing the blogs is to provide faculty an easier way to post public course sites and for students to create public sites for posting course work. (SPARK makes these possible, but in the confines of a registered class.) In June, we are replacing our three-day Dreamweaver class with an hour and a half on how to do the same thing with a blog.

Stay tuned to see what happens next.