SmartSite information

SmartSite is the new course management system that will eventually
replace the course management parts of MyUCDavis.

We will make limited use of SmartSite. The main page for the course,
http://www.physics.ucdavis.edu/kiskis/courses/phy223b-w09/phy223b_hp.html,
is not inside of SmartSite. It is your central resource for the course.

To access our SmartSite, go to http://smartsite.ucdavis.edu, click on
"login" in the upper right, and authenticate via UCD kerberos. Over on
the left of the banner below the word SmartSite will be "My workspace."
This is for your own use and is not our main concern now. In the same
banner, there should be a list of classes, and PHY 223B 001 WQ 2009
should appear or be in the My Active Sites drop down menu. Click on that
to get into the workspace for our course. If you do not see 
PHY 223B 001 WQ 2009, the Registrar thinks that you are not in the class.
If you think that you are registered, you need to work this out with the Registrar. 
If you want acces to the SmartSite without being registered, please talk to me.

Once in our PHY 223B SmartSite site, you will see a list of tools in the left
column. 

The tools that we are most likely to use are the Dropbox, Post'Em, and the Wiki.

The Chat Room is for your use and convenience in communicating with
other members of the class. I will not be looking at it very often. To
ask me a question, you should send email or ask in class or in office
hours.

Things you should know about the Chat Room: Messages you post can be
read by all members of the class and by me. They are not private at all.
Also the history of chats is stored and available for a long time. Thus
in the use of the chat room, it will be best to stick to subjects
related to the class and to be mindful University policies concerning
appropriate language.

GUI glitches:

Although they probably won't be an issue for us, there a couple things
to look out for in the SmartSite GUI. The first comes from the fact that
there are windows inside of windows. You will notice that there are
sometimes two vertical sliders. There can even be three, and one of them
can be hidden in a misleading way. For example, if you are viewing a
document and your browser window is not very wide, there can be three
vertical sliders and one horizontal one. Only when the horizontal one is
moved to the right can you see the innermost vertical one. This is a
problem because it can seem that one is at the end of a document when
there is really more. Also when long lists appear, only part of the list
is displayed. You have to be sure look at the total number of items and
use the arrow buttons to display them all. You can reorder the items by
clicking on the column headings.