To help ensure that students graduate ready for the 21st-century workplace, Certiport has joined the Educational Testing Service to create the iCritical Thinking assessment, which features real-time tasks designed to gauge a student’s ability to navigate and analyze large amounts of information. The hour-long test incorporates skills such as database management, web use, and software use.
Of course, for faculty to use technology in their instruction, they must be comfortable with–and knowledgeable about–technology and how it can enhance education. To help foster this knowledge, Hewlett Packard’s InformEd web site gives college educators access to videos, classroom resources, and stories detailing how educators have used HP technology to bolster lectures, quizzes, and exams. InformEd’s latest webisode is titled “Pen-based computing.” The free site reportedly has more than 4,000 registered members.
One technology that promises to make classroom instruction more engaging is Qwizdom’s new Q7 Presenter, a student response system with programmable pen keys and hard keys that allows for wireless interaction between professors and students. Educators also have access to student help-request logs and answer graphs on LCD screens.
Another new student response system, Turning Technologies’ ResponseCard RF LCD, features a small LCD screen that displays the device’s battery strength and the student’s answer. “ResponseCard RF LCD boasts all the features and functionality of our previous ResponseCard RF keypad, but improves the interactive experience [for users] with its LCD screen,” said CEO Mike Broderick. “We wanted to preserve its compact, credit-card size, as well as provide that additional feedback to [students].”
Campus communications
Several companies exhibited products and services aimed at enhancing campus communications.
For instance, Cellular Specialties unveiled an in-building wireless system designed to boost cell-phone signals in libraries and dormitories, where cell-phone reception often is inconsistent at best. The wireless system uses repeaters, amplifiers, and multi-directional antennas designed to bring flawless reception in any campus building.
Four Winds Interactive has created interactive digital signage that includes easy-to-use features such as drag-and-drop controls, built-in weather updates, and multiple database options, keeping students up to date on the latest in campus activities, cancellations, and course schedules.
And Sprint’s Nextel Direct Connect push-to-talk service has helped campus leaders nationwide communicate with fellow staff and faculty members without the untimely interruptions of older mobile radio systems, Sprint says.
Video solutions
With video taking on an increasingly important role in higher education, many companies demonstrated video-based solutions.
Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite, which EDUCAUSE officials used to record webcasts of conference sessions, lets students watch video of a class lecture while simultaneously sifting through slideshows presented during the lecture. The lecture-capture technology allows students to rewind lectures and watch them again instead of missing crucial information.
Echo360’s lecture-capture software isn’t limited to the classroom. College faculty members can record a lesson from anywhere, such as from home, the office, or the library, for instance. The personal capturing software is compatible with Mac and Windows computers.
TechSmith recently introduced its Camtasia video editing program for Macs, a popular choice among college students. Camtasia lets students and professors record and edit training videos, how-to screencasts, marketing demonstrations, and online presentations. The product’s SmartFocus feature automatically zooms to track the action on stage.
And VidyoConferencing claims to deliver the first multi-point video conferencing solution that operates over any IP network, with no Multi-Conferencing Unit needed. The solution helps college faculty avoid delays, choppy frames, and obscured images during in-class video presentations, and users can have multiple people join a conference simultaneously. The solution’s VidyoRouter has all decoding and encoding occur at the endpoint, leading to enhanced video quality for students.
Vidyo says its conferencing solutions are the first to take advantage of the most recent enhancement to the H.264 standard for video compression–Scalable Video Coding (SVC). The result is HD-quality, low-latency video without a dedicated video network, the company says.
Collaboration, management systems, and more
Web conferencing, teleconferencing, video conferencing, and social networking were among the collaboration and content-presentation solutions featured by Elluminate, the eLearning company. Elluminate products and services help schools and colleges streamline the transition from institution- or instructor-centric learning to personalized, active learning.
The 21st century teaching and learning environment that Elluminate helps educators develop is designed to increase student retention and results, the company said.
Partnering with Elluminate is LearnCentral, a new social learning network available free of charge to schools and colleges. Described as “more than a social network or a learning community,” this open environment combines asynchronous social networking and the ability to store, organize, and find educational resources with the live, online meeting, and collaboration tools provided by Elluminate.
Avenda Systems’ eTIPS network-security platform allows campus IT administrators to identify every student’s smart phone or laptop. The system checks the health of each device to ensure it won’t compromise network security, and it tells a student what he or she must do–like run a security update–to be able to log on to the school’s network.
Campus Management reportedly boasts a 97-percent client retention rate for its enterprise software, thanks largely to off-hours system upgrades for campus IT administrators, 24-7 tech support, customized reporting tools, and regulatory updates that are made automatically. Campus Management also has a portal where customers can discuss the company’s many products and services, which include financial management and student information systems, and Customer Relations Management software.
DocFinity caters to schools ranging from research universities to community colleges with its Optical Image Technology (OIT) that allows administrators to organize multi-layered information systems in every school department. OIT helps with indexing, storing, retrieving, and managing digital information quickly, DocFinity says.
iData, a higher-education technology consulting firm, introduced its Data Cookbook to conference attendees. The new program improves data sharing and reporting with features that enhance campus-wide collaboration. Written by reporting professionals and higher-education IT experts, the Data Cookbook provides a central location to store all the details of a school’s reporting terminology and report specifications. This helps improve the visibility of existing reports and provides clear, agreed-upon definitions for creating additional reports, iData says. The Data Cookbook serves as an “agreement engine,” with tools to facilitate collaboration and make edits that are published only with school approval.
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