Serving tech-savvy students
Never one to pass up the opportunity to pontificate, I gave a presentation last Friday at the WaACRAO annual conference, the group’s fifth such gathering. (With a mouthful like “Washington Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers,” it’s clear why they prefer the WaACRAO acronym!) A colleague in the University of Washington’s Office of the Registrar where I currently work is this year’s president of WaACRAO and asked if I’d be willing to present a “something to do with technology” session. So I did, and am happy to report that the hour-long session was full and at least seemed interesting to the 30 or so attendees from schools across our state.
I promised the group that they needn’t take notes because I’d post the presentation on this site. That’s fortunate because a lot of my presentation links to the good work being done out there by higher education institutions in social media and web services. So jump right into the presentation here, and by all means: share your feedback—good or bad—in the comments below.
My presentation looks at how registrar and admissions offices can better serve college students today. And if you think today’s students can’t be that different, watch the five-minute video A Vision of Students Today here or embedded in slide 3—it’ll convince you.
A quick note on the presentation format: I wanted to avoid PowerPoint and decided to try a web-based slideshow tool. It’s called Simple Standards -based Slide Show System (S5 for short) and was built by CSS and web-standards guru Eric Meyer. Though other themes are available, I left things pretty vanilla so please forgive the lack of visual “oomph.”
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Thanks for the presentation at WaACRAO! It was great and I learned a lot of useful info that I’d previously left to the others on campus who are the web/data experts here.
I noticed you’d said you were using a new presentation method, and thought you’d like to try out Prezi. It’s so neat and a whole new way to look at presentations. If you haven’t tried it, check it out: http://prezi.com/.
Off to look at google analytics now, thanks to you!
Just clicked through your presentation. Wonderful. I love the S5 presenter tool. Very slick. My colleagues just did a similar presentation for superintendents at ESD 112 about using social media in school districts. There are definitely some different considerations in small, rural schools than you might find at the college level. Most want to have a presence on these sites, but have heightened insecurity around public perceptions — still a lot of leftover fear from the days of MySpace and To Catch A Predator. Do those kinds of issues ever come up at the college level?