In High-Tech World, Access To Students Still Difficult

Many schools are going ever-higher tech, trying to catch up with their students.

At the University of South Florida, several thousand students have signed up for a cellphone program that links them in groups to one another and to the administration. Soon, the school will launch a program that will allow students to use their cellphones to check things such as menus and emergency closings and will allow the administration to send simultaneous messages to all.

Some schools, including the University of Maryland and GMU, are launching Web portals, in effect customizing the Web site so that each student gets just the e-mail, basketball scores and updates he or she needs, said Danner, director of portal communications at GMU.

GWU students can sign up for text-message alerts to their cellphones from the District's emergency system; Virginia Tech is considering signing up with a company that works with other universities.

At GU, students have said they might be interested in text alerts -- but not for routine announcements. They said it would be too intrusive, , and they didn't want to get stuck paying for them.

Schools add updates to the Web, post podcasts and send feeds to subscribers.

Most schools avoid putting notices on sites such as Facebook, although they know that students would find them. "That's like nailing Jell-O to a wall," McGuire said, with sites shifting in popularity and new ones popping up.

Brier said that recently a friend realized at the last minute that he needed to fill out paperwork to graduate from GWU. He couldn't believe that the school hadn't e-mailed a reminder.

Brier laughed and told him, "They probably did."

E-mail certainly isn't perfect, Brier said, but added, "I don't know if there is a better way."

Sometimes, McGuire said, the most effective way is the lowest-tech: At Trinity, they scatter paper notices on lunch tables and tape them to the insides of restroom doors. "You get right in their face," she said.