By Laura Sanicola

Last year, the Information Technology department introduced some major changes, including a new login page, new Wi-fi verification procedures and improved Wi-Fi access across campus. This year, Fordham IT is opening various channels of communication to make itself accessible to students and faculty alike.

Most notably, the IT department has had a more active presence on its Twitter account.

“Lately we have been tweeting interesting facts and news relevant to technology, as well as updates about outages or service alerts,” said Dr. Elizabeth Cornell, IT communications specialist.

Many of IT’s announcements have switched from being sent via email to being tweeted using the IT Twitter handle @fordhamIT.

“We are also aiming to support the Fordham community using social media by retweeting many of the major groups on campus,” Cornell said. “There is more to IT than reporting power and service outages.”

The Fordham IT blog is also changing to highlight student achievement in the field of technology.

“In future posts, we intend to profile students who are making developments in technology,” Cornell explained.

Recent blog posts include information on a schedule of the LearnIT series, which is open to faculty and staff “who want to learn how to integrate Google’s powerful applications into their teaching, research and administration,” and an overview of the Academic Computing Environment (ACE), which Fordham IT built and hosts, and which allows “university researchers and their students from the sciences and the humanities at the university…to run high-performance, long-term computations and monitor their progress.”

This summer, IT also revamped the Blackboard mobile app, which allows students to access their grades, assignments and class notifications from their smartphones.

“The app now has a better user interface, to make it more user-friendly,” Cornell said.

Blackboard has also added a community resources tab that connects students with IT Customer Care (ITCC) contact information, frequently asked questions and  the IT Twitter newsfeed.

IT has also  been involved in the development of the new ID scanners. Besides the new identification card policy that requires students to use their card to swipe into campus, student IDs issued from last year onward are now permanent. Starting last year, ID cards are not being reissued at the start of the fall semester. Instead, students must now keep their existing ID cards over the summer and bring them in the following year.

“Students should be advised not to discard their ID card at the end of the semester,” said Ms. Cornell. “Having students reuse the same student ID card each semester saves us a lot of money reprinting new ones for the student body.”

This coming November, IT will undergo a website overhaul in tandem with the launch of the new university website. “We are very excited about this change, as it will be nicer to look at and easier to navigate,” said Cornell.  “The home page will be dynamic, including changing information and featuring students on the front page of the subset of the IT website.”

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Laura Sanicola is the Assistant News Editor for The Fordham Ram.