We have made some upgrades recently in our classrooms as well as some of our conference rooms (128 and 380). Both should be quite noticeable — one literally being in your face.

Who’s watching me?

First, each of the classrooms and 380 has a webcam (with built-in microphone) now. You can use it for web conferencing (such as CarmenConnect) or for recording your lectures in Panopto.

In the classrooms, the webcam is located on a mount near the computer monitor. There is no need to twist the mount to move the webcam around. You can rotate the webcam without moving anything underneath. (In 380, the webcam is on a small tripod on a desk near the TV. In 128, there was already a webcam mounted on top one of the TVs.)

If you don’t like being on video, don’t worry — the use of video is totally optional! You can still get on CarmenConnect or record a Panopto without video. In CarmenConnect, simply make sure not to turn on the webcam. If video from the webcam shows up when you open Panopto Recorder, change it to “None”.

If you don’t use the webcam for video but choose it for audio, the light on the webcam will still turn on when it’s in use. This is perfectly normal and doesn’t mean it’s secretly recording you.

That was fast!

The other improvement in our classrooms and conference rooms was replacing the hard drives with solid state drives (SSDs). These drives have no moving parts and can access data much faster than a regular hard drive. Logging in on a computer, even for the first time, should be much faster. The same goes with opening up programs, especially Panopto Recorder.

Check out this comparison to see how much faster an SSD can be than a regular hard drive. In this video, both computers are the same except for the drive in each. You’ll see a comparison of startup time as well as the time it takes to load a large document in Photoshop. The seconds you save here and there really do add up!