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Panther Bytes Blog
Imagine yourself walking on a path through Schenley Park. The earth is soft beneath your feet. With each step you take, your mind relaxes a little more. In the distance, you see a panther. He is gentle, beckoning you toward him. “You will be become part of my pride, a Panther for life,” Roc tells you. Take a deep breath, as you imagine … graduation.
At Pitt, Microsoft Teams is the preferred videoconferencing solution for meetings, while Zoom is the recommended tool for remote teaching and learning. Each app has been making significant feature enhancements on a fairly regular basis to make them even better.
Following along during a videoconference isn’t always easy. It can be hard to hear people, especially if your audio quality isn’t particularly good. That’s where captioning can help. As of Friday, Feb. 12, Zoom has added a live transcript feature, in addition to generating audio transcripts for recorded meetings and webinars.
In September 2019, there was nearly always a student standing at the Pitt Print stations inside the labs, residence halls, and academic buildings. In offices all around the Pittsburgh campus, the sound of printers was the white noise of a busy department. Heat and the scent of toner emanated from the machines, while documents emerged at a remarkable rate.
The University is in the planning process for migrating from Box to OneDrive. Pitt IT will provide additional information about migrating to Microsoft OneDrive for personal cloud storage as the project moves forward. In the meantime, whether you’re new to OneDrive or have been using it for ages, here are some neat features to make the most of working in the cloud!
The start of a new term is a great time to reassess whether you have all the technology resources you need to be successful. It’s even more important when virtual teaching, learning, and working is the norm due to the pandemic. Here are some tips for starting the semester strong.
The spring semester has begun! Most of you have a semester of remote work under your belt, so now’s a great time to consider what you can do to make things easier should you choose to learn at a distance. Here are five tips and tricks for acing remote classes.
Just as the current academic year began, continuing to adapt to the pandemic remains a necessity for the start of the new calendar year too. Fortunately, Pitt Information Technology has quite a few resources to help students, faculty, and staff stay engaged and productive while remaining physically distant.
It’s a new year, and with it comes annual resolutions. Maybe you’ve vowed to study harder, increase your fitness level, or to lose weight and get more organized? But have you thought about resolving to make better use of technology? If not, I say it’s not too late. Here are my top 4 for 2021.
“Second verse, same as the first.” That was in a lot of my old summer camp songs, and the phrase has been coming to my mind a lot lately. This spring will look a lot like the fall, with the University offering hybrid and virtual instruction.
The nature of being a higher education and research institution means that universities have a lot of information to manage—everything from grades and tuition payments, to employment records and research data. Protecting the confidentiality and integrity of the information we collect is essential and, in many cases, required by law.
Techies are a unique bunch. They love their acronyms—and they couldn’t care less if their alphabet soup means something totally different to everyone else. When they talk about WAPs, they’re talking about something that’s the gateway to much of the knowledge you gain and entertainment you consume.
As with nearly everything else this year, Pitt’s academic calendar is different for 2020-21. Students are facing an extended staycation, with lots of free time on their hands. Many faculty and staff will also have a slower pace of work between semesters. So what’s a Panther to do with so much downtime until the new term begins? Pitt IT has some great ideas:
It’s the Year of Engagement here at Pitt. With the pandemic, most is taking place online these days. That’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, the internet makes it easier to connect to all kinds of people, all across the world.
Microsoft Teams is the official unified communication platform for faculty and staff at the University. Here are some of my favorite features that Teams phone users will like.