When a computer hard drive fails, there aren’t any easy solutions that don’t involve a lot of stress, time, effort, and (worst of all) money.

Fortunately, with the widespread adoption of cloud-based backup tools, you can keep your most important data securely stored somewhere other than your computer’s hard drive.

Here are some tips for backing up your data. If you have specific questions about creating backups, or need help setting up a data backup plan, contact the Service Desk at 617-521-2222.

• Simmons Network Drives are available to all students, faculty, and staff. You can use your personal drive (Y: drive) as backup storage for files you do not want to share. Faculty and staff can also use department drives(G: drives) for files that need to be shared within a department or school. These drives are the ideal location for files containing sensitive information.
• Chrome is the recommended web browser for everyone at Simmons. Whether you’re using it for work or at home, you can sign into Chrome to back up your bookmarks, web history, and more. Signing in means that this information will be available on any other device when you sign into Chrome there. It also creates an almost seamless transition between Chrome on your computer and the Chrome app on your mobile devices. One security warning: be sure not to sign in on public workstations that other people can access.
• Google Drive stores and syncs data continuously. If you install the Google Drive app on your computer, it will sync files to the cloud and to a folder on your hard drive. The files are accessible and editable (some of them online, using Google Docs, Sheets, and Presentations) from any device with an Internet connection. Drive is an ideal space for storing data that you would not keep on your shared department drive (G: drive), which is the go-to spot for any files containing sensitive information, such as credit card and Social Security numbers.

Both Chrome and Google Drive are supported by Simmons Technology and our technicians can assist you in setting up and managing your data storage and backups.

Pilot Testing
Simmons Technology and the Library staff are currently testing the new phone system to ensure that both the infrastructure and phone features work as expected. The testing period also will provide an opportunity for our team to troubleshoot any problems encountered during installation of the new phones, and to verify that the new system will match and exceed the level of service provided by our current platform.

Get Your Calls on the Go
After the snow day (or five) we experienced this winter, we think everyone will appreciate the twinning feature available on the new phone system. Twinning allows you to forward calls from your office phone to a mobile phone or your home phone. Once activated for your extension, you can turn this service on and off at any time, making it a perfect solution when you’re traveling or working from home.

To find out more about the new phone system, please visit theproject website.

When School of Nursing and Health Sciences professor Karen Teeley prepares for each new semester, she draws on twenty-five years of nursing experience and more than twelve years of experience teaching blended courses. Recently, Professor Teeley has expanded her toolkit by adding a set of short, reusable introductory videos that help to engage new students.

The videos are created using Tegrity Campus, our fully automated lecture capture tool. Tegrity provides Simmons faculty with on-demand access to recording services for their courses. Faculty can capture lectures, demonstrations, guest speaker presentations, and other in-class elements for use by their current students and in future courses.

Recorded course content is typically associated with the so-calledflipped classroom (PDF), which many professors at Simmonsemploy to varying degrees. But even if you’re not ready or interested in repurposing your class time for non-lecture activities, capturing content can be a great way to make additional resources available for students or to address complex topics that don’t fit into a single lecture.

In fact, Simmons faculty have used Tegrity to record more than 260 hours of content which students have viewed 33,000 times. Recordings are initiated and shared via Simmons Moodle, enhancing online course content and providing students with additional resources outside of the classroom.

If you’d like to try using Tegrity to record videos for your courses, simply enable the Tegrity block in Simmons Moodle. From there, you can begin recording and sharing immediately. We’ve created brief introductions (PC and Mac) to help you through any technical challenges, and our Service Desk technicians are available to answer your questions.