Colleges expand use of student ID cards

Using the card isn’t yet mandatory on Iowa campuses.

With the swipe of one card, many college students can eat dinner, buy snacks, wash a load of laundry, check out library books, photocopy homework, attend a football game, access a campus computer lab, and open locked doors.

Identification cards have become that one-stop convenience on many campuses, with technology allowing one piece of plastic to perform banking, security and identification functions.

One card can include bar codes, multiple magnetic strips, and proximity chips that all carry different coded fingerprints for students, faculty, and staff.…Read More

College students on QR codes: I don’t get it

Three in four students said they were 'very unlikely' to use QR codes.

When faced with Quick Response (QR) codes, college students have been slow to catch on to the technology, a new study suggests.

Do you snap a photo of it? Do you need a smart phone app? How long will this take? These are a few of the questions students asked in a 24-campus survey conducted during the fall 2011 semester by Archrival, a youth marketing company based in Nebraska.

Twenty-one percent of students surveyed at schools including Michigan State University, the University of Tennessee, and Virginia Tech said they were able to successfully scan a QR code, a barcode-like graphic placed in publications and on points of interest that, when scanned, opens a specific web page on a web-enabled smart phone.…Read More

Google lures more colleges to Gmail with bigger inboxes

Google announced 25 new education customers this month.

It’s already higher education’s most popular eMail hosting service, and Google’s Gmail could attract more university IT departments after the company more than tripled its Gmail inbox size for educational customers.

Gmail inboxes will jump from 7 gigabytes to 25 gigabytes “over the course of the next few weeks” for schools, colleges, and universities that use the suite of online educational tools known as Google Apps for Education, according to a June 24 company announcement.

Read more about Gmail in higher education……Read More

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