From CUNY Academic Commons

A. Communicate with your students

• Send an e-mail message to the students in your class and let them know about extended deadlines and other changes in your class schedule (if any).
  * Also, consider attaching important files (like reading assignments) to this message.
  * If you don’t have a list of e-mail addresses for the students in your class(es) already, you can retrieve such a list via webroster ( see http://screencast.com/t/FznsXFjW ). This is something available at Hunter. If other colleges do not have a functional equivalent, they should consider making such service available.

B. Make alternate plans for the classroom

Things to do while Bb is unavailable

• If you use your own (or loaned) laptop in class, you have most important files with you anyway.
• If you are using a desktop computer in the classroom, bring files you intend to use in a session on a USB drive.
• Rather than e-mailing important files to your students as attachments, put these files on an alternate server

+ such as a departmental web server

+ personal server space at Hunter available to faculty at some but not all schools/divisions (e.g., social science faculty has been offered web space on the “urban” server for many years)
+ personal server space which comes with most home ISP (Internet Service Provider) contracts
+ (free) personal server space provided by various organizations/vendor including Google Documents
+ shared folders provided by file synchronization services like Sugarsync (free 45 day trial) or Dropbox (first two 2GB are free)

Things to do (continuously) when Bb is available

• Make sure to download the grade center at regular intervals to have a local copy ready.
• If discussion board posting are important in your teaching, save important threads or forums (using the “collect” feature).
• If you have students submit assignments online, make sure to download all submissions (as one .zip file) as soon as the deadline has passed.