You are most likely familiar with SPIRE as the place to go to see your class rosters and submit grades at the end of the semester, but more and more feature keep getting added into SPIRE. Over the summer OIT added a variety of new tools that can help you with managing your courses.
Some of the new SPIRE features that will be of particular interest to instructors:
- Create a Course OIT Account: Create a new OIT account for each course that you are teaching. This comes with an email address, UDrive, a UMass Blog, and Web space.
- Class Photo Rosters: Photo rosters for your class (based off student ID photos) are available to all instructors who earn their Security Certificate or FERPA Certification.
- Create class email lists: Create email mailing lists for the classes you are teaching each term (including summer and winter sessions.)
- Manage your OIT Account(s): Look up your current OIT account(s) and reset passwords. (Particularly useful for instructors in departments that don’t regularly use their OIT accounts.)
Read more about the other new SPIRE features at:
http://oit.umass.edu/spire/whatsnew.html