My TechDecisions

Jessica Kennedy

Jessica Kennedy is an editor at TechDecisions Media, targeting the higher education market. Jessica joined the TechDecisions team in 2014 and covers technologies that improve teaching and learning.

Rotman School of Management Engages Students, Community with Digital Signage

February 3, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

Digital signage is a top technology that help schools interact with today’s college students. It provides multiple benefits in the higher education realm, from helping schools communicate messages in a more cost-effective manner, launch emergency notifications, provide wayfinding capabilities, and beyond. After its renovation, the Rotman School of Management took its digital signage to another level with massive signage installs. Since installing these digital signage solutions, the school has been able to display real-time financial information and customized content created by its media and events team.

Read More

5 Mistakes Colleges Make With Their Digital Signage Solutions

February 2, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

Digital signage is one of the hottest forms of technology used on college campuses across the country. Colleges use their digital signage solutions to boost their sports culture, provide wayfinding on campus, teach classes, and ultimately attract prospective students. However, digital signage gets tricky and can fail if colleges make major mistakes, including not knowing what style of digital signage to use, creating boring content, investing in a solution that doesn’t fit the space they want to install it in, not being careful with the equipment, and hiring cheap labor to do the job.

Read More

Central Arizona College Invests in Crestron Gear, Mobile Furniture for Collaborative Classrooms

January 22, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

Central Arizona College was charged to craft collaborative rooms for students to bring their own devices while leaving instructors’ teaching undisturbed. The college answered the charge by investing in mobile furniture, Crestron AirMedia and Crestron Fusion RoomView technologies. Now, these classrooms enable students to move around and reconfigure the classroom, support students’ variety of devices, and maintain teaching familiarity and comfort for instructors.

Read More

5 Access Control Tips To Keep Your College Campus Safe

January 19, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

Even though card keys might be old-fashioned for access control solutions, they are still a popular security item on today’s college campuses. However, colleges should still consider revamping their access control solutions and strategies. Five key access control tips include: investing in mobile access solutions, electromechanical key systems, relying on a campus card office for assistance, insuring your network and looking to the Cloud for more data storage.

Read More

5 Tips to Keeping Your College’s BYOD Control in Check

January 12, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

BYOD is a common expectation of today’s college students. But what happens when students abuse it, or when a professor or administrator loses control of what students do on the network? Xirrus’s Bruce Miller says that this is a common struggle in today’s higher education institutions, and that colleges should consider keeping network access under control. Five major ways colleges can keep their BYOD access in check is by covering use cases, deciding how much control a class needs, bringing in a third party, getting granular with control and upping the in-class engagement.

Read More

UMass Lowell Making Learning Leaps with Lecture Capture Initiative

January 8, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

When students started struggling in an enhanced calculus class back in 2005, Randy Tyndall and his team wanted to install a solution to help. Their solution of choice was a lecture capture system by Echo360, which enabled professors to capture lectures and computer demonstrations on a single screen for students to view after class. Lecture capture has also upped active learning among students, encouraged flipping the classroom, deepened distance learning, increased student retention rates and made it easier for professors to archive their lectures.

Read More

Coastal Bend College “REVELs” In Learning Success with Pearson

January 1, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

With digital learning on the rise, Costal Bend College invested in REVEL, an immersive learning, online-based platform for students to supplement their classroom learning. Professors like Karl Clarkare using REVEL to assign videos and reading assignments to students, and have direct, digital communication with students if they are struggling with a certain topic. Students can use REVEL to complete additional assignments, and to check their understanding of course material with quizzes and simulations. REVEL is purchased on a per-class basis.

Read More